Let the games begin!

It all starts today: the long-awaited Rood-Karr kitchen renovation. As I begin this blog, siding, windows and storm doors are being removed from our leaky back porch, soon to be demolished.

Our house is a Tudor Revival style, built in 1939 by builder Walter Gilbert for his own family. We admired it for years, and have owned it since June of 2000. During those years, we've lived with a kitchen so dysfunctional it deserves its own reality show. The previous owners confided, "We redid the kitchen, but we've never liked it." Our architect's sober diagnosis: "You have a severely fragmented work triangle."

During the next several months, brick walls will be breached, and the bricks salvaged. Faulty plumbing will be given its first-ever opportunity to vent. Awkward contemporary oak-n-walnut cabinets will be replaced with traditional white, and chipped, burned laminate counters with something else (at the very least, new, unchipped laminate).

And yes, tempers will fray and all of us -- even the children -- will tire of pizza.

But today, anything is possible. It feels a bit like the very early stages of pregnancy, or even Braxton-Hicks contractions near the end of it: slightly uncomfortable and exhilarating at the same time.

I just hope it doesn't take nine months.