The new drawer

Awhile back, several months ago now, Grandma DD (my mom) came to visit. She often comes to take care of Ada and, among other things, clean the stove and the refrigerator and fun stuff like that that we no longer care, or have time, to do anymore. So DD was here cleaning and tried to open the top drawer under our kitchen counter. She couldn't open it so what did she do? She pulled with all of her might until it opened, darn it. When it did, she was in for a surprise. It wasn't really a drawer at all. She had pulled off the face plate to what would be a drawer in any normal home, but the developers who remodeled our building failed to install a drawer in the top slot of the cabinet. It's the same in all of the kitchens in our building because they were stock cabinets meant for a bathroom and therefore should have a sink basin that dips into the space a drawer would slide into, thereby making a top drawer unnecessary. In our case, they just covered the cabinet with a granite slab, didn't go to the trouble of installing the missing drawer and said, "whatever, no one will notice."

No one, except my mom.

See my mom is a realtor. She snoops around houses for a living. And she's a practical woman too. You can imagine her surprise to find a "fake" drawer in my kitchen. And you can imagine my surprise upon returning home to find Ada napping and happy and my mom holding on to the face of my cabinet drawer wondering what just happened. Then for the followup reaction, "Rick can totally go to Home Depot and get a drawer for this and you'll have more storage space. You can't just leave it fake. That's silly."

$30, 2 weeks of waiting for the special order drawer, and 5 hours of fiddling with the darn cabinet later, we have a functioning drawer. And we have the drawer for our neighbor too but it's in our hall closet too afraid to come out of the box until Rick has more free time. But now we have a drawer. Which is great and we have a home for our oven mitts and a few trivets. Yippee! I'm sure our resale value went up at least $5 for that effort right? Sure.

And the drawer is great, except for a tiny, tiny, itsy, bitsy problem. Rick had to install a new drawer slide too. The new one is way better than all of the other drawer slides because it is two rollers on the sides instead of one roller in the middle on the bottom of the drawer. It's metal with plastic wheels whereas the rest of the drawers are wood on wood slides with a plastic do-hicky and no wheels, lots of friction. The new one slides really nice and fast now and all of the other drawers are jealous. That's not the problem. The problem is that Ada wants to pull up on all of the drawers so she can stand up, because that's what she does now. And when she climbs from the lower drawers that don't move so easily to this top drawer, well, to be honest, she wipes out. She grabs the handle and Whoop! down she goes. An accident just waiting to happen.

Here's Ada just prior to wipe out.

Moral of the story: You can't plan for everything. Even good intentions for increased resale value can go bad in the tear-filled eyes of a child. She still loves you DD.