We’re remodeling our kitchen. Everyone keeps saying the same thing when they see my exhausted face: “Think how nice it’ll be when it’s done.” They mean the kitchen. New cabinets, new countertops, new everything. The same room with a changed face.

I mean something different. I mean the end of the purge.

Here’s the thing about a kitchen remodel that nobody warns you about: it’s not really about the kitchen. It’s about everything in and around the kitchen, and whether it deserves to survive the transition. Drawers get emptied. Cabinets get gutted. Things you haven’t touched in years suddenly need a verdict. Keep, donate, trash. Over and over, for weeks, and not just in the kitchen; the disruption radiates outward into closets and shelves and corners of the house that weren’t part of the plan.

I have a pocket sandwich maker — it presses two slices of bread into a sealed triangle of whatever you stuffed in there. Ours made pockets of molten cheese and pizza sauce in our old house, back when we were our kids’ age. It’s old. It’s objectively time to go. But disposing of it feels like disposing of the memory, and I’m not sure I understand people who don’t feel that way.

Marie Kondo asks if it sparks joy. Yes, Marie! The memory of my stupid pocket sandwich press sparks joy!

The kitchen genuinely needs this. Berta spends a lot of time there; our whole family does. The counters are old and stained. There’s a ring where the sous vide burned into the surface that she gets to look at every day. The cabinet doors don’t stay closed. There’s a deep, dark corner cabinet where the grill tongs go to hide. I keep complaining about our work triangle, but that’s architecture and it’s never getting fixed. The point is that this isn’t vanity; it’s a workspace that’s worn out, and Berta deserves not to work in it anymore.

She got genuinely excited picking over cabinet hardware – shapes, sizes, colors, finishes, no perfect combination of any of them, and she loved every option. We went to multiple stone yards for countertops, compared backsplash tiles, debated grout colors. Grout is a word no person should have to say as frequently as I’ve said it in the last month. Watching her get enthusiastic about these choices has been fun. Her excitement for the adventure is its own reward.

My comfort lives more in the stuff. It feels a bit like hoarding when I truly examine it; but I’ve always thought of it in a “I probably have one of those” way. I’m the person who owns a USB charging cable with a tiny animated display on it that you can customize from your phone. It shows you how charged the device is, which – incidentally – is something a normal cable with a screen can’t even do; those only show charging rate. When I mention that I have something like this, the response is almost always “of course you do.” I take that as a compliment. It means I’m the person you call when you need something weird, because I’ve probably encountered it, probably own one, and can tell you whether it’s worth the money.

A remodel runs directly counter to that instinct. The house gets lighter. The shelves get emptier. The wand mixer is gone. The sandwich maker is gone. I can’t make maple syrup foam for pancakes anymore. These aren’t tragedies; I know that. But they’re small, real losses that don’t register on anyone else’s scale.

Don’t get me wrong – I think decluttering is so nice. Having a place for everything, starting fresh; that’s a genuinely good side effect of tearing a room apart. And ridding my office of the endless under-desk cables (what purpose did this weird thing serve??) and vicious dust bunnies is quite the delight. But people can go overboard with it. The conventional wisdom is that less stuff equals more peace, and I think admitting that’s not true for you is strangely taboo. Collection gets treated like a disorder. I genuinely don’t understand minimalists. I mean, I get it, but that is definitively not for me. There’s a version of having things that’s just evidence of a life with range – things tried, skills acquired, interests pursued far enough to need equipment.

I chose this remodel. I’d choose it again. The showroom trips with Berta, watching her face when she finds the right tile, spending an afternoon together doing something that matters to her – that’s been the real product. Not the kitchen. The kitchen is her artifact. The time together is mine.

But “think how nice it’ll be” still hits me differently than people think. They mean the new countertops. I mean the moment the house stops asking me to give things up, and - with the benefit of a bit more order and a bit less clutter - starts feeling like me again.