New kitchen Coming! Excited and Scared

We signed the rental agreement for our apartment without seeing it in person. We were living in Florida and needed a place to land when we arrived in Israel. My husband's Israeli pen pal checked it out and sent us a video, and then we just exchanged a couple emails with the landlords and hoped for the best.  When our cab from the airport dropped us, our three kids, and ten suitcases and boxes off on that rainy day at the end of 2009, we were pleasantly surprised.  We had some bad experiences moving into dirty apartments in Pittsburgh and South Florida after the landlord had promised to fix things and clean the place. In Florida we had to leave a deposit and get on a waiting list without ever seeing a unit.  (The floor plan was much exaggerated.) But our apartment in Israel was CLEAN! The landlords had left us basics like tissues and toilet paper, and food and treats. They left us tables, chairs, a mattress, and arranged for us to borrow blankets and pillows from neighbors. They turned out to be the nicest people ever.


They also mentioned that they knew the kitchen would eventually need to be re-done.  The kitchen is a decent size and the counters are lovely, but the cabinets have... personality.  They won't all close completely. In order to open one, you often must first open another, or with some you need to push one closed in order to open another.  In order to get in one drawer, you must lift up the one on top of in and hold it in while you slide another one out.  The walls and shelves of the cabinets are coming apart and the fronts have been covered by shelving paper, which is peeling. The walls could be worse, but the motif is quite dated.

As we signed on the dotted line for our third year, our lovely landlords had just had their first babies, twin boys, so we felt a little guilty asking about something as big as a kitchen renovation. But really, the time has come.  Today a man came to take measurements and they will start work on Monday. I'm excited to finally have shelves that are flat and level, to have cabinets that open and close, and not to have things living in the walls of the cabinets in places I can't reach. But I'm also scared. Not only do I have to move EVERYTHING, even our oven, out of the kitchen for a week, it's the week my mom is coming! And I haven't been involved in the design. It's not my apartment. What if it's worse? So, here are my "before" pictures. And I hope to have some sparkly, practical, and ergonomically designed "after" pictures not much more than a week from now.  Here's hoping!