We’ve been doing up the house. Nothing dramatic, just the slow, financially ruinous crawl from upstairs to down. Bedrooms first. Then bathrooms. Then the living room. And now the kitchen (inherited from the previous owners) is sulking. Every time I walk into it, I swear the tiling looks a shade more shabby-shite 2006.
It’s not that much is broken. Except the tired Maytag fridge freezer, a burner that doesn’t ignite and the sink tap leaks, oh and the ruinously-expensive-to-repair-out-of-warranty Miele dishwasher. It’s just been… outclassed. Like turning up to a wedding in M&S when your wife’s in The Row.
And this irritates me, because I’d quite like to think I live with a bit of restraint. I’ve written before about resisting the upgrade spiral. About not living like a man permanently preparing for an estate agent’s photoshoot. But it turns out that once you start, the rest of the house doesn’t politely wait its turn, it stages a coup.
The formal name for this, according to Rory Sutherland, is the Diderot Effect. You buy one nice thing and everything else starts to look shit by comparison. Diderot got a red dressing gown and ended up replacing half his house. We bought a fancy shower mixer and now the kitchen tap feels like it came out of a skip.
Which is how we end up here. Discussing a kitchen renovation because although it’s neither urgent, nor falling apart, it’s because the surrounding rooms have raised the bar to a level our sad little units can’t clear. And I hate myself for it. Because I also know that if we do go ahead, the new kitchen will make the hallway feel dingy, and the garden and patio will look lazy and provincial, and so on until we die or go bankrupt.
And yet, this is the maddening bit, I also know we’ll probably do it. It’s not vanity. We don’t want quartz or fluted wood or some comically oversized kitchen island, we just want to stop thinking about it. To be able to walk through the space without mentally adding it to a list.
It’s the tyranny of the unfinished, the psychological admin of rooms and spaces you haven’t yet dealt with.
There is, of course, a way to dodge all this. You could adopt the Sutherland doctrine and buy a 16th century house. One of those glorious old piles that look better because they’re full of crap. But we don’t live in a Tudor house. We live in an Edwardian semi in Surrey where any attempt at minimalism makes the place look like a probate sale, and maximalism makes it look like you’re an edgy creative that’s gone mad on Etsy.
So here we are. Planning a kitchen. Not for resale. Not for guests. Not even for ourselves, really. Just so the hallway shuts up about it.
AI: This piece was, as ever, written by me. I used ChatGPT to sub-edit, and keep the tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives, and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpts and image that accompanies it.
John Gibbard 