Have You Updated Yet?

  Our house is thirty years old.  We were not its original owners, but we were close. We were thrilled to find this pretty corporate relo in Peachtree Corners, which was only about two years old when we were transferred to Atlanta from North Carolina.  We’ve raised our two sons largely in this wonderful house and have long ago gotten comfortable with its odd quirks, drawbacks, and faulty original construction.  We’ve repaired everything that fell apart, quit working, or wasn’t up to code promptly and properly. We are definitely the folks that you want to buy a house FROM! 

   Having said that, though, in recent years we had politely blown off all sage advice from our realtor friends that the wallpaper had to go and so did the kitchen counters and cabinets.  We just smiled when our painter said the same thing.  Dragging my husband and me into the 21st century was not easy work!   Our realtor friends warned us that we would surely take a hit on our sale price if we didn’t update.

    We started with the master bath and said goodbye to wallpaper I loved. That is when we met Richard Webb and Berkeley Woodworking. They built us a wonderful new two-basin vanity. One year later, we were still mulling over how we might accomplish this updating thing in our decidedly dated kitchen. We’d replaced the appliances over the years as they aged out on us, so nothing was really pressing us to speed up our plans. No hurry. We weren’t going anywhere.

   As we were very slowly getting used to this “updating” concept, which is sort of like having to get over the seawall at LaGuardia Airport before your flight can successfully soar, our kitchen imploded.  Apparently, we were not moving forward fast enough for the Kitchen Fates because one by one, our kitchen appliances either went on life support or died.  I have never heard of this happening before in quite this way. The only thing that still worked was the garbage disposal and it had issues.

   We were trapped into using a cooktop we all hated because it had to be scoured every time anybody used a burner; the wall oven had difficulty coming up to temperature and food always needed at least ten additional minutes to achieve “done”; the refrigerator door suddenly refused to stay closed so we had to keep it shut with a big wooden salad fork that had just the exact curve to it to keep the two doors properly closed. When the microwave flat quit and two days after that, the “start” button on the dishwasher was deader than a doornail, my husband said with remarkable equanimity, “I think we might as well gut this kitchen and start over!”  And so we did.

  Richard and Carmen Webb, owners of Berkeley Woodworking on South Berkeley Lake Road, were wonderful guides for us through this extensive and expensive process. Richard completely reorganized our kitchen in his design, made it much more efficient, and gave us a lot more storage space in the process. He also had the brilliant idea to get rid of the wet bar that we never used, tear down the wall, and enlarge and rearrange our laundry room into that wet-bar space as well. It was really a brilliant idea and I loved it!

   The critical path on this remodel project went almost perfectly from Day One. Richard was absolutely organized and we knew who and what to expect on any given day. His longtime employees, Chad, Francisco, and Nino, were so easy to have around and they cleaned up at the end of every workday so we were never left with a big shocking mess.

   Five weeks and Richard was finished, for all intents and purposes. We could use the kitchen.  We had to wait just one more week for some special ordered seeded glass to arrive to finish two cabinet doors, so those were the last to be installed.

   We think we got a perfect job. Nothing in our house is plumb, level, or straight. Everything that Richard and his employees installed is plumb, level, and straight. They kept track of every single detail, no matter how small.  When I mentioned to Chad once that I thought something looked fine, he quietly replied, “Fine isn’t good enough for us!”  They look for perfect.