Towel Pig Hunting

In my journey as a home remodeler I have come across the most helpful site http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums or as the frequenters call it, the GW. I cannot even begin to tell you how immensely helpful this site, in particular the kitchen forum, has been to us throughout the process of envisioning and realizing what our home is to become.

The kitchen has been the projects of all projects. The most anticipated, the most exciting, the most dramatic, the most important, along with the most expensive, the most maddening, and the most drawn out. The kitchen has always been the one room that I have wanted to be perfect, I am a person who just wants to stand in my kitchen and drink coffee, gather around the island with friends, I picture holiday buffets and cookie baking extravaganzas, I see myself making delicious meals while the boys do their homework all in my wonderfully amazing kitchen. This is the expectation, this is the plan.

And this is reality...it has been 5 years, the kitchen was supposed to be the first project, it was in the most dire need of attention. Well I should say the room that was to be the kitchen, because when I moved in it was not a kitchen it was a room with tile. That's it tile, no counters, no cabinets, no appliances, no sink...just tile, hideously ugly tile. My soon to be husband had been living, as bachelors often do, in a most primitive way. Who needs a full size refrigerator taking up space when you can have a mini fridge behind your recliner in the living room? No running water on the first floor, no problem there is a garden hose right outside the front door and if you don't want to go outside you can always fill the dog's water dish in the bath tub upstairs. I actually remember attempting to cook Eric dinner one night and sitting on the porch with a bucket of water and the hose scrubbing potatoes thinking if only my friends could see me now they would really get a laugh out of this one! Then having to grill this dinner on the smallest grill I had ever seen, you know the ones that you sit on the tailgate of your truck that have the propane tank that screws on the side, yeah that was the extent of my cooking facilities.

Needless to say, the kitchen was first on our list of rooms to be done. We went to a cabinet company and had a beautiful kitchen designed and we were so excited to get started on it, but then life gave us a wonderful surprise named Max and the kitchen plans were put on hold. It seems for about the same amount of money you can either finish the kitchen in a house or everything else, so we decided on the everything else so that we wouldn't all be living in one room...which was lucky because when Max was just 5 months old we found out we were expecting another wonderful surprise named Grady.

So we finished everything else and lived with the kitchen. We made some modest improvements like a utility sink (which was really fun doing dishes in pregnant!), we bought a nice range and refrigerator, and Eric found a table that his grandpa had fashioned from an old door and that was our counter space, oh and I almost forgot to mention the rubbermaid container and book shelf that we used to store our food and dishes. Add all that to an empty room with ugly tile and you have yourself a makeshift kitchen.

But now finally, at last, and for real this time we are finishing our kitchen. But now it must be perfect! I have designed and redesigned it, I have researched kitchen planning to an extent that I am probably more qualified to design a kitchen than some of the people that work at the big box stores as kitchen designers. I tend to get obsessive about things and I can't let them go until they are exactly as they should be and I am on the quest for the perfect kitchen for the Kinsey's. Which leads me to the towel pig...

What is a towel pig you say, I said the same thing. When I first saw the post on the GW I thought they must be speaking of a man, like my husband, who doesn't get all the dirt off his hands before he dries them on nice hand towels. (Which reminds me of that scene in Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson scolds John Travolta for the same offense, but I digress)

But no, that is not the kind of Towel Pig to which was being referred, THE Towel Pig is the cutest little resin statue that some lucky soul discovered in TJMaxx and had the revelation to place on her kitchen counter as a place to lay her damp dish towel...what vision!

And now I must have it...my kitchen will not be perfect without it. I am not the only one, there are several of us in search of this elusive pig. The internet has been scoured, little shops have been searched, Tuesday Morning and TJ Maxx has been explored, no stone has been left unturned. Sure there are other pigs out there but none as perfectly porcine as the pig in question. I must find him, it's the only way for me to have my perfect kitchen, the search continues...