What do you cook in a million dollar kitchen?

The Farm Manager is busy with one of those real estate porn shows. This one’s about folks who spend up to a million bucks on renovating a kitchen.

I don’t even know how that is possible. Sure, you can bust the bank on a Sub-Zero fridge and a La Cornue range and lava countertops, but you’ll still have a long way to go to make it to seven numbers.

People can lose touch with reality on these renovation projects. I remember back in the nineties, my buddy Bruno had a little carpentry shop, and he somehow ended up with a contract to supply and install the new interior doors on Paul Reichman’s home reno in Toronto.

Bruno was quite the self-promoter. Everywhere he went he carried around a roll of stickers that said “Bruno’s Custom Woodwork” along with his phone number. Wherever he saw some nice millwork, he’d slap on one of his Bruno stickers. Public library, traffic court, U of T admin buildings, didn’t matter what. If there was some extra-fine craftsmanship on view, there’d be a Bruno sticker stuck to it somewhere. Somewhere Paul or Mrs. Reichman must have spotted one of those stickers and jotted down the phone number.

Now Reichman’s home reno was quite epic. It went on for years and from time to time aspects of it would make the papers – usually legal aspects. Reichman spent as much on lawyers for his reno as he spent on the house, which was many millions.

Which was of course somewhat ironic because Paul Reichman was at that time in a bit of a funk due to having birthed the biggest bankruptcy in Canadian history, that of Olympia and York to the tune of 20 billion dollars.

I was doubly aware of the irony, because I had almost simultaneously birthed one of the smallest bankruptcies in Canadian history, an amount considerably less than what Reichman was spending on these doors.

So I can appreciate that people get carried away with reno projects, but why?

Seems to me if you’ve got a million lying around for a kitchen reno, you could just scrap the kitchen entirely. Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe keep a hotplate and a microwave for a cup of tea and some warm snacks, but that’s it.

You can order in from Dominos or KFC twice a day and it’s going to take you at least fifty years to make that add up to the cost of your million dollar kitchen.

And you won’t even need a dishwasher.