The Elephant in the Room

On September 27, my husband and I agreed that we ought to sell our house.  As much as we love the house, our current location requires him to drive an hour and fifteen minutes to get to work.  This is a bit excessive.  Coupled with the announcement that my work hours would become unpredictable, we figured that selling the house and moving closer to his job would be the best course of action.

Since then, I have asked other departments if they needed an extra set of hands.  Consequently, my hours have skyrocketed, and I find myself with more work than time.  While this is a very good thing for my paycheck, it has resulted in less time to prepare the house for sale.  We have finished all of the interior painting except for a few small areas that need a touch-up, and our backyard has been tamed to the point of being reasonably pleasing.  We are awaiting a referral for a guy who can put in new carpets, and we have some fairly straightforward plans to improve the front yard.

However, that's not the elephant in the room, which lurks over my shoulder as I type.

 When we moved into the house, the kitchen walls were painted electric blue, and the kitchen cabinets had had their lovely honey-oak wood grain painted over with gloss white paint.  This is a photo of the kitchen before we moved in: 

Admittedly, it doesn't look so bad in the photo.  The photo mutes the offensively loud electric blue paint into a pleasing sky blue, and the white appears to blend nicely.  In reality, the blue was an eyesore and the white is a few shades lighter than the off-white of the living room, which is directly attached to the kitchen.  Compound that with the fact that the living room has wood grain laminate flooring along with vaulted ceilings with open beams and wood planking, and you have a modern, almost art deco kitchen right next to a rugged, neutral-toned room.  The two did not agree with each other.

In a moment of insanity optimistic ambition, I decided that I would strip all of the cabinets and cabinet doors in order to stain them a glorious dark mahogany.  My husband removed the cabinet doors in preparation for the project.  We bought jugs of Jasco, mahogany stain, and countless paintbrushes, and commenced.

Fast forward almost two years.

To my consternation, the project remains unfinished.  Seven doors and all of the drawers are refinished, and they look really good.  One of the lower cabinets is also finished, and the lower cabinet by the sink needs one more treatment of stain, plus clear coat, and it will also be complete.  On the other hand, about 2/3 of the doors are in my garage, partially stripped and not ready for stain in the least.  The cabinet in the lower left has been stripped except for the supports and the wood directly below the tiles.  In short, it is not done, and we aren't sure what to do.

The trouble is that the magnitude of the project has convinced me that we shouldn't have embarked on it in the first place.  We should have left the darned things white, or paid to have them replaced rather than have them sit in an incomplete state for such a long time.  While it is not as urgent as we thought, we do still need to sell the house, but we can't sell it while the cabinets aren't done.  Thus, we are left with a decision.

Do we give up and repaint everything?

Do we stain the bottom cabinets and the doors, leaving the upper cabinets white and the lower cabinets stained, with some white on the edges for an accent?

I've put a lot of work into the project so far, so it's not an easy decision.  However, it is undeniable that something needs to be done.  As I sit here typing, the cabinets loom over me, and I am constantly mindful of them.  Heck, I may just tell my husband to go ahead and paint them.  That way, the project would be done within a day, and we could be done with it.  As I write that, I think of the beautiful cabinet doors that are already done.

Sigh.  I hate making decisions sometimes.