A Landfall Kitchen in King's Grant

My father-in-law told me that when my wife was a little girl,  he and my mother-in-law almost divorced. It was over the Christmas Eve assembly of the Barbie Dream House. The late-night whisper fight over proper construction methods and the dubious structural integrity of Barbie’s new digs proved too much.

I think this was his way of telling me not to buy a fixer-upper.

Not following the example set forth in the Parable of the Barbie Dream House, Lauren and I set out to buy a fixer-upper. At the time, I worked with my father-in-law designing and building kitchens, media centers, and high-end trim in the McMansions around Southport. All I wanted was a McRanch in Wilmington, but one filled with my work.

The day we found the house, the first signs of the Parable began to show. We walked into the house with the Realtor, and we all smelled it – dogs. As far as I could tell, the former occupants had raised incontinent mastiffs.

When I looked around the room, I saw potential. Sure, the carpet had many “pet stains” on it, and in one place it did look as if someone had tried to recreate the prom sequence from Carrie, but the bones of something good were there. The kitchen was plain and the living room abysmal, but these were spaces I could work with.

A few weeks later, Lauren and I walked into our house and began to make plans to turn this into a home we could be proud of. When the dumpster arrived a couple of days later, we went back after both of us had finished a long day at work. We opened every window and started ripping up carpet. Within fifteen minutes, we’d started to argue.

“Rip it this way, not that way.”

“You don’t know everything.”

“Ow, I poked my finger on something.”

“Do we need masks?”

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Don’t you talk to me like that then.”

I left. I got in my car, drove to Best Buy, and bought a Sirius Satellite Radio boombox. When I got back to the house, tempers had settled, and when I plugged in the radio and listened to the soothing sounds of the Grateful Dead Channel, the carpet didn’t seem so daunting.

The next night, we sat in our dining room, listening to the Dead, and talking about what we could do here. I sketched a little, measured a lot, and dreamed up a dozen designs.

My father-in-law and I built and installed the cabinets in every room, made wainscoting and door and window trim, hung every interior door and every foot of crown molding. Without his five-year mentorship in the cabinet shop it would’ve never been possible to build, and without his parable hanging over my head, one of us – either Lauren or me – would have been found rolled up in that smelly carpet at the bottom of a dumpster full of construction debris.

But it didn’t turn out that way, in fact, quite the opposite. On the day the movers were carrying in our furniture, they stopped on the very first trip and looked at our kitchen.

“Man,” said one mover, “y’all got a Landfall kitchen in King’s Grant.”

A Landfall kitchen in King’s Grant. That’s what you get when you heed the Parable of the Barbie Dream House.

Jason Frye is the author of two travel guides to North Carolina, a food blogger for Our State, and an all-around swell guy. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram: @beardedwriter.

To view illustrator of artist Mark Weber's work, go to www.markweberart.blogspot.com.