The island’s dream | The Press

Even tenants enjoy watching home improvement shows. We’re not allowed to have animals, barely children, we have to ask permission from the landlord to change the slightest thing in his apartment, but we can tripping on these programs where, in one hour, we see the transformation of houses and condos, as we watch the “before/after” of cosmetic surgery. Knowing that we can never afford such face lifts.

Me, what I love are kitchen renovations. I love to cook. I’ve always envied those people who have two ovens, pans hanging from the ceiling, and above all an island with a built-in stove and plenty of room to cut food. It seems to me that I concoct my recipes between the toaster and the coffee machine forever. But who cares: the most important thing is to love cooking.

In the house that we just inherited from my in-laws, Mo and Djo, the kitchen is small, “European style”. This is not where we can store food like survivalists. I’m thinking of buying a tomb type freezer for the basement, where we can keep our leftovers or hide a corpse. But this kitchen, I’ve always found it pretty and warm, even if it doesn’t correspond to my dream of the island, the one you see in all those soap operas where people live in huge, immaculate houses, with open spaces. open, never messed up. In mine, there’s a serving hatch and a piece of door frame at the entrance that was vaguely spruced up by Mo, after Zara, Djo’s rottweiler, the nicest dog I’ve ever met , ate the wall in her senile dementia – she died at 16, rest her soul.

Anyway, I watched the show too much. Sell ​​or renovateer when we inherited my boyfriend’s family home. Renovation shows end up with us fucker the brain, I’m sure. What we manage to do there in a week, and whose results we present in an hour, makes you want to tear everything down and start from scratch like Joe Bocan.

This fantasy gives rise to heresies like those people who remove century-old moldings from the ceiling of an old house to make smooth walls – it’s uglier afterwards than before.

I was looking at my father-in-law’s kitchen thinking about the labor shortage, the material costs, and especially the risk of doing damage that brings more damage to a century-old house, and there was no there is no question of tearing down the load-bearing wall, just to fulfill the island’s dream. In the midst of an inflationary crisis, I’m not going to go into debt for that, so we’re going to stay European. Everyone has open concept kitchens with an island, but who can boast of having a serving hatch, huh? We’ll just have to buy a bigger gas stove and saw off the counter a bit to make it fit, because we’ll never be able to cook a turkey to have the family over for Christmas with that tiny stove that’s there, particularly ugly too.

You will understand here that we are not doing business with designers before settling. We manage. We make a cross on things, we focus on the most important. I spent a month testing my butt on couches at every store in town, and my dream couch was about $4,000. I finally bought one on Marketplace for $600, the exact price of the Legault government check sent to my boyfriend.

But the lesson to be learned is that you have to take it one day at a time. We don’t live on a renovation show. It is impossible for everything to be arranged as we would like before we settle down. It’s a bit what gave me nightmares, these details that I wanted to settle in a few weeks. This pressure of perfection.

If we want to live in this house, we will have to think in the long term. Like those who built it. Like Mo and Djo. Not like house freaks.