Free How to Cook a Moose by Kate Christensen

the original pine-plank upstairs floors had been uncovered under many layers of linoleum, carpet, and tar paper, and had been refinished; and all the walls were freshly painted in warm colors and off-whites instead of the awful institutional pale blue we’d inherited. Now, in the second phase of the Yankee Palazzo renovation, our entire kitchen and dining room had been gut-demolished down to the joists and beams and brick.
    When we bought the house, the kitchen was all pink granite counters and white melamine cabinets, white appliances and a horrible Brazilian cherry floor, and the walls were painted the same cold sky blue as the rest of the house. The huge side window was Sheetrocked over, so the room was dark. We hated that kitchen, hated cooking and eating in it, and it seemed to us that the house chafed and protested against this bullshit with every joist and beam; we could almost hear it.
    To help offset the cost of the new kitchen, we sold the old, clinical melamine cabinets, the cold-as-tombstones granite countertops, and less-than-stellar appliances on craigslist; people came and carted themaway and gave us a lot of money for them, which struck us as an amazing deal.
    In their place, we envisioned old wood everywhere, a copper bar top, butcher-block countertops, and a Mexican tile backsplash. While Patrick’s guys banged away in there for weeks, taking down the old posts from the wall that separated the dining room from the kitchen, we drove around southern Maine and scoured the Internet, hunting for materials. It was a great adventure from start to finish. Brendan found a hardworking, straight-talking guy up in Poland Spring who took barely used appliances out of rich people’s summer houses in Cape Elizabeth or Bar Harbor when they traded up for new ones, and resold them on consignment out of his barn for a fraction of what they would have cost new. One thrilling day, he delivered our butter-yellow Viking stove with gas burners and electric oven, plus a Bosch dishwasher whose didactic beeping mechanism he’d dismantled for us, and a beautiful stainless-steel Viking fridge with a bottom freezer drawer and luxury of luxuries, an ice maker (I’d never had one before).
    Most of the materials we used were old—“repurposed,” as they call it. Brendan found the 1880s tin ceiling tiles for sale online in Ohio and had them shipped here; we bought the wide, weathered first-growth pumpkin-pine floorboards that graced an old 1770s barn wall from an old-wood purveyor in South Portland; and the stacks of hundred-year-old maple boards, which were used to build the kitchen cabinets, the base of the bar, the refrigerator encasement, and the wainscoting in the dining room, had served as the flooring in an old mill in Biddeford. All these materials were full of history, rich with age. It was exciting to see them installed in our old house instead of the soulless new crap that had been there when we’d bought the place. We felt as if we were restoring the house’s beauty and character.
    The contractors never once quailed at these materials, never complained about the unorthodoxy of using them. In fact, we felt, andthey evidently did too, as if we were all collaborating on an interesting project. They seemed to approve of our choices, our vision for the house, because we were restoring it, using as much old material as possible, rather than trying to make it into something it hadn’t been intended to be. Also, we were obviously not rich brats dripping with money; we made a point of waiting for each subsequent step in the renovation until we’d earned and saved enough so we wouldn’t fall behind in our payments. We tried to make decisions knowledgeably and decisively and change our minds as little as possible. And we respected the fact that nothing can happen overnight; we trusted them to work at their own pace.
    If we upheld our end of the deal, they exceeded theirs. They were fun to