My Mad Men Kitchen

So, I finally started watching Mad Men a few weeks ago--thanks to my sister in law's Netflix account--and have been as caught up in the shows aesthetics as I am in the story lines. I will admit my absolute shock the first time I saw the Draper family's kitchen, it is uncannily similar to the kitchen at The Hive. The knotty pine floor to ceiling cabinets and weird useless little carved shelves and niches. I hate them, both, my real kitchen and the Hollywood version. I think it looks dark and dingy and dated.

I have envisioned gutting The Hive's kitchen and replacing it with clean white cabinetry and light grey flooring and pale Corian countertops...a clean, bright, airy space. However, I am trying to think of this dilemma from both an aesthetic and environmental perspective. First of all, ripping out the existing kitchen would mean having to purchase all new materials, this means increasing consumption and dumping all the old items into a landfill. This is wasteful considering that everything that is currently in the kitchen is still perfectly serviceable, it all functions just fine it is just not to my current taste. Secondly, white cabinets and light countertops are simply the current fashion. Won't they look just as dated in 20 or 30 years? Aren't tastes dictated by trends and didn't my grandparents when installing the knotty pine kitchen originally do so because it was stylish? I am going to resist the urge to "granitize" my kitchen--a fabulously accurate term I picked up from my new favorite website www.retrorenovation.com

So, I'm going to try to live with it, for now. Try to learn to love it. And, who knows, by the time I like it it'll probably be back in style.