Well, it's almost here. The big day.

Wait, I don't mean Christmas. I mean the day where we rip out the nastiness that is my kitchen counter and replace it with new, clean Formica.

Ah, Formica.

So we bought this house four years ago with the idea that we were going to add on a big room to the back and remodel the kitchen and bathrooms. Check one bathroom off that list.

To be fair, it's a beautiful bathroom, and we did it for (relatively) little money. My husband ripped out all of the pink tile that covered the walls by the tub, replaced it with some really nice brown glass tiles, put in a new window and made a beautiful windowsill (he's pretty much the windowsill master, for reals) and put a new piece of Formica on the old vanity and painted it, and the did a nice glass tile backsplash. So, yeah. That got done.

The rest of our plans have just sort of been floating in the atmosphere, along with my plans to weigh 150 pounds and my husband's plans to run a marathon.

Hahahaha…okay, neither of those are real plans. If you know us, you know how ridiculous they are.

Anyway, December 26th is the day we will start on the kitchen. We need new cabinets and stuff, but we decided to just do a little face-lift, since we both have a few days off and we had a bit of money set aside to do something from our growing list of house projects. Also, we're both really not into granite countertops.

Don't mock my Formica. That stuff holds up really well, if you're careful, and for the money I think it's a much better deal. I think we'd do a wood butcher-block counter, maybe, but I can't see the point in putting something that fancy onto my craptastic old cabinets. I really hate them. I really, really do. However, we don't have time or money right now, so we're going for the Formica. To give you an accurate picture of our current situation, think of white, grainy, 60s-style marble. Then, imagine that image on Formica. Then, imagine that Formica after 48 years of scratches, burns and stains.

That's my kitchen.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not unfamiliar with bleach. Me and bleach are BFFs. There is not enough bleach in the world to make these things sanitary. There's just not. I don't care what anyone says. So I never, ever put anything edible directly onto the counter, unless it's getting washed and cooked before it goes into somebody's mouth.

Really. 

And I think four years of that is enough. Not to mention the ugly. And it is ugly. A special kind of ugly that makes all other countertops, even the ones in my sister's kitchen (which is significantly older than mine) look sparkly and nice. It's like the ugliest of all the ugly 60s kitchens. We painted the cupboards white when we moved in, because the woman who lived here before, bless her heart, had done a light whitewash over the pine cabinets and then stenciled flowers and checkerboard patterns and Bible verses all over the doors.

Nothing against the Bible up in here, but whoa. It was like the Amish Country Store threw up in my kitchen. Or maybe exploded is a better word. I'm not sure. Anyhow, the lovely white, pink and blue color scheme was not really to my liking, so that had to go. A picture, you say? You'd like to see what that looked like? Can I do that?

Yes, yes I can.

This is the photo they had on the realtor's website. I saved it, because, well, when your kitchen has a "before" picture like that, it sort of makes you feel all proud inside. Also, it's much less scary to do renovations when you realize that the only way it could possibly be any worse is if it looked like this but was dirty.

And in my house that is not going to happen. So I'm not scared at all.

This is what it looks like now, significantly better, but still…those countertops make me puke.

So watch out for the "after" photos, because I'm pretty sure I won't be able to handle the excitement and my brain may explode.

But not all over my kitchen, because that would be gross.