Hey all, Molly here! Kate wrote a very lovely, very mushy blog post about our meeting, and I don't think I could have said it any better. We fell, literally and figuratively, on our first date, and we're going full steam ahead.
What she didn't mention is that only three weeks after we met, she left for Chicago for three months. On my birthday. She broke this news on our second date, and though she probably didn't believe me at the time, I told her I'd come visit her. I don't think she expected me to stick around for the three months she was away, but I knew better. And after a couple of visits to Chi-town and Kate's three week vacation in December where she came back to the east coast to meet my family, we knew we wanted to live together. A little fast? Definitely. Crazy? Perhaps. We both kept trying to reign ourselves in, saying things like, "Well, let's just see how it goes when you're back in New York..." and "I guess we should try to be more practical about this..." and "But how many cats can we really fit?" That didn't last long, though, and after a while, we knew what we wanted and we knew we could make it work.
But being the foodie that I am, I made it clear early on that we'd need to make some significant changes in the kitchen. A stove from the '70s whose oven didn't work? A refrigerator that held one carton of milk and four strawberries, and... that's it? The dingy yellow color? I don't think so. This would be the most challenging kitchen re-organization I'd ever tackled.
Neither of us had the money for the full-on renovation we wanted, so we had to get creative. First up was finding a working stove. We were limited to a 20" model, though, and weren't loving any of the options we found for new purchase. One Hotpoint model looked like a cartoon stove, with its bloated front and flimsy construction. The Avanti models were the most aesthetically pleasing, but even they were slightly more expensive than what we wanted to spend, and we weren't 100% assured of their quality. A friend of mine owned one in the past and described it as "finicky," plus the floor model at PC Richards with a cracked handle and crooked door did not inspire confidence (if that damage occured while sitting on display, I don't want to know what would happen with signigicant usage).
Ever the fans of All Things Old, we looked into vintage and antique stoves. But 20" models were rare in those designs, and even when we found a place that sold refurbished apartment-size vintage stoves, they were going for $1,800+, almost an entire month's salary for me, so that was out of the question.
But then a stroke of luck: one bitter cold January morning, while Kate was still asleep in her sterile Chicago sublet, I was browsing the website for Build It Green NYC. I've always kept a peripheral eye on this website, because they have such interesting things. For those that aren't familar, BIG is a not-for-profit that specializes in selling salvaged materials from building sites. So if you need an old claw-foot tub, a fire-place mantel, old doors, or, say, a 19" Royal Rose white enamel stove in great working order, BIG is the place to look. When I saw this beauty on their website, I threw on some semblance of an outfit, fed the cat, and walked the 10 or so blocks to their Gowanus location, calling Kate every thirty seconds or so on the way to try and wake her up.
After some hemming and hawing and a ton of picture messages (the stove was in nowhere near perfect condition, but ultimately we decided we liked the worn look of it), I bought our beautiful Rose for $300 and paid some movers a little more to deliver it to Kate's apartment, hook it up, and haul away the old one.
She gave us a few surprises, our little Rose, both good and bad. First we were surprised to discover that her 19" width was actually ideal for our space, as the old 20" stove hung over the edge of the archway by one inch. Also, wrapped up in all the excitement of finding Rose, we failed to realize that she had no electric pilot light, and needs to be lit with a match or lighter. Our girl's special, but we love her anyway.
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