My Big Fat 80's Kitchen

If you’ve read here long, you know I’m one of those people with the quirky need to name my stuff.

My car is Ebenezer.

The GPS is Gypsy.

My debit card is Debi.

I spell it that way in my head

so as not to confuse myself.

The list goes on…

Although I would love little more than to move to the country and dub my home with a poetic name, I have not named our house. Even in Debbie Land, it seems a bit silly to name a home in a 20 year old subdivision. So though I long for my Pine Knoll, my house is just called The House.

My kitchen, on the other hand, has a name.

And it’s Rip Van Winkle.

I named it after the man in the story who fell asleep for twenty years only to wake up a misfit in the world around him.  Yes indeed. Rip Van Kitchen is so stuck in the 80s that it has big hair.

Plaid wallpaper...

With a huge fruit border...

To be fair, the fruit was added in the 90s. I put it up to cover the original colonial blue border that said “Welcome Friends”.  I think it even had pineapples.

It was supposed to be a temporary fix.

Sigh...

The wallpapered kitchen went along with the rest of the wallpapered house. When we bought the house, it was covered with roughly 2,800 square feet of the stuff. Aside from the living room, every single room had either paper or border. Some had both.

It didn’t bother me at the time. I like a challenge. Of course, I was also over a decade younger and had more of a stripper’s body back then, too. I jumped right in, and over the first few years, did my stripping act all over the place.

In the den…

Up the stairs…

In the bedrooms…

In the home office…

In the bathrooms…

Had I been a blogging stripper, I'd have pictures…

But Rip Van Kitchen kept getting put on the back burner. Yes, I realize that it’s the heart of the home. Yes, I know that it’s supposed to be the priority room …Yes, I know it affects property value…
Wok Wok Wok Wok Wokkkk….

Rip stayed stuck in the 80s. 

Basically, there were three reasons:

First? Money. We’re committed to this cash only thing, and other room fixes were cheaper. The kitchen is the big Kahuna. We need want a new floor, and new cabinets, and new countertops, and sink, and lighing, and ...

Well, you get it.

Second?  My serious obsession with the big Ta Da.  I could have done any one of those updates over the years. I could have at least stripped that wallpaper and painted the walls for goodness sake, but oh no…

Oddball as it may be, it is more acceptable in Debbie Land to apologize for a kitchen with big hair for over a decade than to complete a portion of a project.

I know. Sad, isn’t it?

But mostly? Fear. You see, stripping wallpaper in this house has given me sheetrockaphobia. This is the irrational fear that wallpaper has been gorilla glued to bare walls and will come down in one inch fragments, bringing the sheet rock with it…

…which results in major reconstruction

 and unkind sputterings about builders and previous owners.

I would rather avoid it.

So in true Debbie Fashion,

 I have neglected Rip Van Kitchen for over a decade.

But blogland has an uncanny knack of inspiration.

So I decided to do a little experiment. I pulled the refrigerator away from the wall, soaked the paper behind it in a solution of fabric softener and hot water, closed one eye, and peeled….

And guess what? It wasn’t raw sheet rock! Nope. It had been painted beneath and came off fairly easily.

So I kept on stripping…

And stripping…

And stripping…

And by the time I finished,

 it looked like this.

No ugly wallpaper!

No fingernails either, but they'll grow back.

All told, the Great Stripping Adventure took about two weeks. The soffits were the biggest pain. Half of the wall paper was attached to bare wood there. This part came off in millimeter sized pieces most of the time, but I stuck with it.

So there you have it:

How Rip Van Kitchen

 became

 Strip Van Kitchen.

 Of course, I jumped off Stripper Mountain with no clear vision as to where to go next... 

I know. Sad, isn't it?

So if you see me peeking around in your kitchens with a notepad and shiny red Kodak, don't be startled. Be flattered. I'm just looking for some inspiration.

****

By the way, I feel the oddball need to say that I took a few days away from blogland to spend undivided time with my two favorite college girls who were home for fall break.  I'm sure you missed me, right? right?

Yeah... that's what I was afraid of.