Simone Giertz had a name for the gap between her refrigerator and the adjacent cabinetry: ‘the fridge mullet.’ It was the kind of nickname that could only come from someone who had stared at an unfinished kitchen long enough to give its worst parts personalities. With three mismatched cabinet colors, a bare-sided island she called ‘a bare butt,’ and a pantry shelf threatening to face-plant at any moment, the kitchen had accumulated the quiet chaos of a house where the builder never quite finished. The plan was to fix all of it in three days. With a team, a router, some stamped sheet metal, and an amount of yellow paint that most people would consider excessive.
How you demolish a kitchen with one borrowed pair of arms
Day one opened with cabinet doors coming off their hinges, every last one of them cracked and paint-worn beyond repair. Giertz called in Ramon, who had helped her build a staircase a while back, specifically because she was running low on hours and arms. The routing work came next: a pass along the flat front faces of each cabinet to cut in the grooves that had given the kitchen its farmhouse character six years ago, when she first bought the house and the doors were completely smooth. A sturdier replacement for the collapsing pantry shelf went up. By late evening, her body had issued a firm veto, and she knocked off for the night, returning hours later after, as she put it, ‘a snack, a shower, and two-thirds of the second Wicked movie.’ She taped edges and filled holes until the small hours, then went to bed for real.
Day two meant paint stripper and yellow. A lot of yellow. Giertz describes herself as ‘a firm believer that a yellow kitchen is a happy kitchen,’ which is not a philosophy she can fully explain but also does not feel the need to. The old paint on the cabinets had been applied badly enough that the stripper lifted it cleanly, which she received with the particular satisfaction of someone whose past shortcuts have occasionally paid forward. Editor Blette showed up in a repurposed trash bag to help with the painting, and somewhere in the middle of the yellow work she delivered what Giertz called the best line of the project: ‘It’s amazing what we can do when we have to.’
Custom tile hardware, an almost-destroyed shelf, and the last-day rage
The hardware was the detail that could have broken the whole project. Giertz had noticed her kitchen tile and started wondering whether she could press pieces of it into stamped sheet metal frames to make cabinet pulls unlike anything a hardware store would carry. She ordered the metal blanks, 3D-printed a set of recessed inserts, and mixed epoxy. Mark handled the cleanup on the metal. Giertz glued the tiles in. The result was something she described as ‘exclusive,’ possibly because it was genuinely expensive, possibly because it was just genuinely beautiful. Installing the pulls on the last day, with the clock down to minutes, she was operating on what she described as the specific stubbornness of someone who has gone past her own limits and turned briefly into a three-year-old. ‘I realized that I’m strong because I’m weak,’ she said, in the particular way people say true things when they are exhausted. ‘It’s really responsible for me to be lazy.’
The shelf that had been on the to-do list for two years, the one for storing drinking glasses, got its veneer and its acorn nuts. The drying rack went in behind a cabinet door so it disappears when not in use, an old Scandinavian trick that Giertz seemed genuinely delighted to have deployed. The fridge mullet was replaced with actual storage. The three cabinet colors converged on one.
The birthday cake that looked like surgical waste
Scraps, her dog, turned out to be a terrible baker.
It took four days, not three. Giertz made the correction plainly and without apology at the end, noting that four honestly did not feel like a bad result. The yellow kitchen, which she had worried about through the final night, looked exactly right by morning.
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