Kitchen Remodel in Gothic Ave.

"Thirteen years ago. And literally when we came in, they had started to remodel the kitchen. It was original to the house. It was 1952. At some point, counters had been changed, but it was pretty bad. And at that time it was like, okay, well, we need to do the kitchen and blah, blah, blah. And then time passes, and time passes more, and you get used to it and you just live with it. But it had been something that we had been talking about literally since the day we looked at this house. Yeah. No, we talked to a whole bunch of different contractors, right? And so Eli came in and we went through the whole thing, and we talked to other people, and then we liked what he had to say overall. I mean, it was very difficult to compare apples to apples across the board, but once we sort of broke it down, he was absolutely the right way to go. So that's what we did. You know, I work in home renovation television. I've been a part of renovating hundreds of kitchens, so I'm a terrible client. I felt really bad going in because it's like I know just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to actually execute it. So I had made like dozens of drawings and spec ideas and vision boards, and God bless Donna because she had to take all that and actually make sense of it. And it was great. I mean, she understood it right away. She got what we were looking for, gave us things we didn't know we were looking for, I think, which was really nice, and just made it easy for me. It could feel like work, and I didn't want it to feel like work. I think her name was Natalie. She came in and was designing it on the fly as you were sort of walking them through. As you were talking, she was pulling it up on her laptop, right? And then she would build it out, and then you would say, ""Well, I want this,"" and she would say, ""Well, what if we flip that with this? That would make more sense in practical terms, how you're living."" You go, ""Oh my God, I didn't think about that. So that makes sense."" And so it all sort of happened in real time right there at the table, which I thought was kind of cool, actually. It wasn't a lot of back and forth. It was let's knock it out right now. And they measured everything and you talked through it, and it was a full-on collaboration, right? And yeah, I think you got everything you were looking for, and it's all in the right place too, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a thing that people, if you haven't been through it before, you look at all these pictures and you go, ""Oh, that's pretty. I want that. Oh, that's pretty. I want that."" But you don't necessarily think how it's going to work with what you have or in your space. And that was what was great about Donna and her team, was that she listened to the things that I wanted and could figure out how to make those things happen in this footprint. And that was really interesting to me, just in terms of being able to go, well, how many spice jars do you have? We spent a lot of time figuring out how many drawers I needed and how wide those drawers needed to be. And it was those little details that you don't necessarily think about when you're like, I want a spice drawer. And it's amazing. Everything has its place, and the silverware goes here. It just made so much sense, and it was not my point of view, I guess, ultimately. Like, I wouldn't have thought to do that, and then she would come up with this idea and it was like, so brilliant, where did that come from? It was great. She knew better what to do with the space that we had already been in for 15 years than we knew what to do with that space. One thing I will say is I've worked with contractors all over Los Angeles, all over the country, and they all say the same thing when you meet them, like, ""Oh, it's going to take six weeks and that's going to be easy and you won't ever know we're here."" And that never happens. It happened. It was amazing. And I work from home, so I saw everything that happened. We met with Eli once, and then we had him come back again, and we made our final decision. And when we made that final decision, he was like, ""It will be this amount of time from the day we start."" Forty days, and it was 48. We signed a contract that said 40 days. So yeah. And I didn't believe it. I was like, ""Okay, sure, whatever."" But it really was insanely fast. Not to say that it was effortless. I mean, for us, not being in the kitchen was hard, but we got used to it. But his team was great. You know, his foreman, Giovani, was the first one here every day. And when he said he was going to be here, he was here. And they worked hard. They cleaned up every day. I think that was the thing that amazed me the most. Of all the sites I've ever been on, at the end of the day, they just leave their stuff. Not this team. They would leave at the end of the day, and you would not know anyone had been here. You would think that it was like a project that had been stalled for months because there was nothing here, and then the next day it would get dirty again, and by the end of the day it's clean. It was amazing. Yeah, and they were just communicative over text. We had a text thread going, and if there were any questions, I would text them, they would answer. I never got the feeling that I was bugging them. And trust me, I asked a lot of questions. But they always had good answers. They were collaborative, I think, which is nice. I think there were some things we weren't sure about, and we talked it through. It all made sense. I would, and have, recommended them to anyone that asks if I know a contractor. And I feel a little bad because there are contractors all over Los Angeles that know me, and if they knew I wasn't recommending them, I don't know how they would feel, but this would be my first go-to for sure."