I promised you all the story of the kitchen and home disaster, and before it fades away, let’s do it. This is one of those… “you can’t make this stuff up” situations.

This was our kitchen, the one we’d worked in for the last 15 years. It was getting run down. You can’t really see it unless you look closely at the enlarged photo, but there are things like in the upper right corner, the wood has separated and rotted, the doors aren’t hanging straight, handles are falling off, and, it’s one of those things that gradually, stuff gets broken or messed up in some other way, and you just work around it. Out of sight, there’s a pantry closet to the right of the refrigerator.

And then one day in mid-June, those cabinets on the upper right, the end closest to the refrigerator, just suddenly broke away from the wall and collapsed, leaving it hanging at an angle, still attached at the far end. What you can’t see here is that there’s a big wooden box holding up the cabinets at the close end. Amazingly, despite that those cabinets were full of plates and glasses, not one of them broke. But, it was clearly time to use our “rainy day fund” and get the kitchen redone. We pulled stuff out of the upper cabinets, just to take the weight off of them.

And, we contracted a carpenter by the name of Ricardo Soto through friends in the Peruvian community, who came in, measured everything gave us a quote, along with two other carpenters who we contacted through other means. We decided on his quote both because of the community connection, and a better price. Deposit paid. Quarantine measures were still in place here in Buenos Aires, so upfront, he told us things would take longer than normal, with material deliveries and when they were allowed to work. And, things dragged on…

Meanwhile, everything from the kitchen cabinets was piled up in the dining room…. Plus we were constantly worried that those cabinets were going to just come completely off the wall.

Finally, after much delay, and some excuses that began to sound a bit suspicious, in early October Ricardo gave us a date. He sent in his guys one Friday to remove the upper cabinets and the pantry closet, and told us that the new cabinets and closet would be delivered Saturday morning and they’d put them in that day, and then return on Monday to remove and replace the lower cabinets all at once.

So we spent Friday cleaning and fixing up the walls – patching spots, laying down coats of primer, and then painting – a bit of a rush job, but got it done.

On Saturday morning, a truck arrived, and four cabinets were unloaded, along with two small shelving units. None of them were the right size, the construction was poor quality, and… no Ricardo. And we heard nothing from him all day Saturday, nor Sunday. On Monday, he suddenly appeared with excuses about his phone and wanting to know what the problem was. We pointed out the workmanship and the fact that the cabinets weren’t the right measurements, let alone that they were incomplete, the two shelving units had nothing to do with our design, and the closet pieces were missing.

He agreed, called for a truck, loaded everything up, and left, and that’s the last we ever heard from him. He changed his phone number, his wife, Cynthia Albujar Sánchez, who Henry knew, blocked our calls. We ended up starting legal proceedings, which resulted in us finding out that he was illegally in the country, and that he had a known gambling problem, and… it just kept going. To date, he hasn’t been found, and things are in the hands of the legal system.

Meanwhile, once it became clear that he wasn’t going to get back to us, we got ahold of one of the other two carpenters who’d given us a quote, and who’d come recommended through friends of mine, Quinto Elemento, explained the whole situation, and they came almost immediately to help us through this. They’ve been great through this whole process. Now, it was mid-October, they had other jobs they were working on, and they told us it would take until the first week in December to get things done for us. But hey, it needed to be done. And, of course, we needed to put down another deposit, this time 50%, and at a bit higher price. That pretty much wiped out our “rainy day fund”, so we went into it knowing that the balance was going to be on credit.

And then, a couple of weeks into the process, one of them had a heart attack and spent several days in the hospital and then home on bedrest after for a week or so. I told you, you can’t make this stuff up.

Meanwhile… yes, of course, there’s a meanwhile… as long as we were fixing up the kitchen, we turned our attention to the rest of the house. Much of it was stuff we could do ourselves. But we found a local handyman who was “down and out” because of the pandemic, and gave him some odd jobs to do. He was in and out of the house over numerous weeks, fixing things here and there. And then one day, while I was out, and Henry had left him alone to go upstairs for something, he apparently saw an opportunity, and had figured out where I kept my cashbox (for years, I’d been saying, I needed to get a wall safe, because one day…) and he grabbed it and stuffed it in his bag before Henry came back down.

I mean, a windfall for him, because I had literally, the afternoon before, gone and transferred the balance for the carpentry work via Western Union and put that in the box, added to the money we normally keep there, both in pesos, dollars, and currency from other countries we’ve traveled to, amounting to thousands of dollars total, and, my passport. That put us in a serious, deep hole, because I’d already borrowed in order to pay the balance, as well as it was all of the money we had to live on for the next couple of months – we’re still shutdown in terms of Casa SaltShaker because of pandemic measures – over 10 months now.

So, another legal proceeding, and it turned out, this guy had a record of doing the exact same thing, and was wanted on more than one count of robbery. Luckily for us, he’d just gone for a crime of opportunity, as it turned out some of his past robberies included violence. He hasn’t been found yet. I guess given that, it might be good that we had a cashbox rather than a wall safe (which we now have), because rather than just grabbing it, it’s possible he might have hurt Henry in order to get into the safe.

And…

… we were sitting around a day or two later and suddenly heard a weird thump upstairs. We have a small half bath off the bedroom there, and, apparently, the flooring underneath, which turned out to be cheap wood with a layer of vinyl flooring over it, had rotted away due to a leak at some point in the past is all we can guess. And, the toilet had simply collapsed into the floor. Luckily, one of the maintenance guys from the building was available – he was also going to be doing some of the non-carpentry work in the kitchen, in coordination with the carpenter, and he immediately came and got to work. It took him three days with putting down a proper concrete floor and topping it with porcelain tile, but…

…he did a great job. Ignore the weird coloring – it’s just shadow, not dirty, but I couldn’t edit it out easily. It looks great! He even stripped the walls and repainted them while he was at it. Of course, replacing an entire floor like that, between materials and labor, costs.

Needless to say, we were in a bind, and those who’ve been reading along, know that a few weeks back I posted a plea for some help. And, with generous support of friends, family, customers, and even a couple of people who just read the plea, but didn’t know us, we were able to pay back all the money borrowed on credit, putting us back in the “well, we used up our rainy day fund, but that’s what those funds were there for” situation. We’re also still out some of the stolen money, but so be it, at least we’re not in the hole with the credit card.

And, finally, this last week, a month behind schedule due to unforeseen delays, including the aforementioned heart attack, the kitchen is complete. And, it looks amazing, and we’re getting used to the new space. Here’s a little tour….