While St Louis’ traffic congestion is better than most cities, not even OUR road system can handle the worst rush hour traffic.
Same goes for your kitchen on Thanksgiving. Yeah, your kitchen is probably fine for just about every other day of the year. But on Thanksgiving Day you have more people, more food, and more time pressure, all stuffed like a turkey into the same floor space, counter space, and appliance capacity.
OK, it’s just one day a year, so you’re not gonna bring in Gordon Ramsay to scold you, tell you what a fool you are, then replace your kitchen with a commercial-grade facility featuring 8-burner Viking cooktops and Sub-Zero freezers. So while your humble correspondent is but a humble handyman and not a celebrity TV master chef, let me offer some advice on how to make your kitchen less of a pressure cooker on Thanksgiving Day:
Detonation of Smoke Alarms
Probably nothing is more disturbing to Thanksgiving guests than smoke alarms going off. In the best case they think their dinner is burning so they’ll be dining at McDonald’s, and the worst is they’ll need to gather family members and belongings to evacuate.
The cause is almost always either that the exhaust on the range hood has not been turned on, or there is NO range hood, or the existing range hood is blowing the exhaust back into the room instead of sending it outside. No matter what your situation, Fix St Louis can handle this. We can duct the exhaust of ANY range hood to the outside (even those that recirculate back into the kitchen), we can install cooktops with downdraft units that send the exhaust down to the basement and then out, we can replace your range hood with a more powerful unit, and we can install a new range hood anywhere, even over a kitchen island.
Counter Space
Do you have a microwave oven sitting on a countertop taking up valuable space? Fix St Louis can install an over-the-cooktop microwave with a built-in range hood on the bottom. We can also install a combination wall oven and microwave oven in one of your walls.
Cabinet Space
Do you have cutting boards and sheet pans in a cabinet stacked-up on each other so they’re difficult to pull-out, and taking-up a lot of space? Let Fix St Louis install vertical dividers so you can store them on their edges. We can also install pull-out trays in your cabinets, so you can actually reach and use cooking equipment you’ve even forgotten was back there.
Ice
It’s easy to run out of ice when you have visitors. Maybe you’re not using your ice maker because there’s no water line behind the fridge to feed it, so you’re taking-up a lot of freezer space with ice cube trays that also spill when you can’t easily fit them in. Well, Fix St Louis can run a water supply line back there, behind your fridge. And maybe you have the perfect place in your home for a separate standalone freezer, but there’s no outlet there. We can handle that, too.
Water for Hot Drinks
One of the best appliances that very few people own is an instant hot water tap at their kitchen sink. Think of how easy it would be to get tea, instant coffee, or hot chocolate for guests if you could pour hot water anytime you wanted to. Also after the holidays, think of how much more often you would pour a hot drink for yourself. Fix St Louis can install these instant hot water units.
The holiday season is stressful enough without having worries that you or Gordon Ramsay think your kitchen is inadequate, and that you may have an expensive kitchen remodeling project in your future. Just about any kitchen can be made more functional, so you can wait to redo the cabinets until that time when you are really sick of the way they look. It may be too late for these improvements before Thursday’s holiday, but Fix St Louis‘ schedule is currently not as stuffed as your turkey, so we might be able to fit you in before Christmas. Operators are standing by. Happy Thanksgiving!
Dr Steve
Fix St Louis