One day while cooking, I cut my finger while chopping broccoli. (Okay, I bit my finger while eating French fries.) Nevertheless, through very little fault of my own, I got put into a bad mood and decided to hate my kitchen – which I will do on occasion. Today, the source of my ire was that the side counter gets sticky sometimes, and so I ranted and raved and made Burke wonder if Tinder requires an age verification.

In my huff, I ran off to the bedroom (after finishing the fries or bringing them with me, I can’t remember which). Burke knocked on the bedroom door and extended her phone screen. Presented on the screen was a gorgeous kitchen whose original, scraggy face was hidden beneath or within the dolled-up, though vaguely familiar exterior – kind of like Barbara Streisand.

There were glass cabinets and sleek wooden counters. Warm dimmer lights ran under the cabinets and a large sink was backed by flowers. Then it dawned on me.

“Wait, this is our kitchen?”

“It is. I told Chat to use only what was available at (I am concealing the name of the store) pIKEA. It built us a kitchen just based on that.  

“Wow!”

In that moment I understood the draw of renovation. Chat’s disturbing, dangling-just-above-the-uncanny-valley abilities to transform reality into fantasy combined with the pIKEA website for kitchen designs caused me to become wondrously obsessed with all of the possibilities. Rustic cabinets, vast kitchen islands, double sinks. It’s like porn for people who own things they sometimes hate.

The problem is, of course, that these things would only fit into a kitchen that could host an episode of Top Chef, and not so much a 2kk in Prague 9. But I still thought about it all day long. I considered knocking out my living room.

“Do we really need a couch? I mean, we could sleep on the island, right?”

“We need a couch,” Burke countered.     

“Yes, but look at the size of this island! I think Gilligan lived there!”

“You’re sitting on the couch now.”

“Fine.”

We made an appointment to talk to a kitchen designer. A kitchen engineer. A kitchen stylist. Their instructions were simple: show up on time, have some ideas about what you want, have all the measurements for your entire house.

It came with a guide.

I measured every angle of the kitchen, the fridge, the sink, the stove, the cabinet. I measured my coffee pot. My best friend became a pink tailor’s measuring tape that now accompanies me everywhere. His name is Tapey.

Tapey was in my pocket when we met with our kitchen engineer. He was in my pocket when my kitchen engineer was shaking her head at my poor measurements. He was being gripped in my pocket as my kitchen engineer kept murmuring to herself in Czech “Nevejde se to.”

And then the translation to me: “It won’t fit.”  

She said this wearing a face that I assume the doctor wore when giving John Belushi his blood numbers. That is, not happy. But my kitchen engineer persisted, she pushed and prodded. She defied math and geometry and space and time, and finally made a surprised smile and raised her eyebrows.  

“Vejde se to,” she said to her keyboard.

“It will fit,” she said to me.

I patted Tapey in my pocket in victory. I was sweating. Evidently nothing in the history of my life has mattered as much as getting that little kitchen island and my fridge in the corner and rustic cabinets.  

We came home with a plan. It was too good to be true – we knew this, but we went to a pub for lunch to prolong our blissful ignorance. When we got home, I took out Tapey and used him to measure the stove and hopeful fridge corner. We were off by 5 centimeters. I frowned and looked at Burke.

“Nevejde se to.”

I handled it well. I ranted and I raved. And I grumbled and Burke went back to check out Tinder’s use policies and I went into the bedroom and used Tapey to measure how much rope might go from my ceiling to, oh, say about three feet above the floor. Then I measured myself. I looked at the dog.

“Nevejde se to.”