Except it's all new to us, and as D-Day (that would be "Demolition Day") fast approaches it would be dishonest to say we are comforted by the retrospectively comic tales of survivors.

At least, I'm not. It didn't help matters, when we sat down for a late lunch last week at Sang Kee Asian Bistro, our wrinkled blueprints spread out on the table.

We'd been to a cabinet showroom in Chester, and for a startling change, had actually settled on a stain (burnished maple) and color (morel vintage): "Why Americans need kitchens?" chuckled Carl Chou, the manager. "They don't cook. "

This is a forgivable view from the vantage point of a busy Chinese restaurant. But that was when it hit me that in order to restore our kitchen, we'd have to destroy it; and for the foreseeable future I certainly won't be doing much cooking myself.

Our kitchen has bugged us for 20 years. The cabinets are cheesy, dark-stained plywood. The floor is inexplicably three inches above the level of the dining-room floor. The corners of the cheap, sea-green tile we laid ourselves have cracked off here and there, giving the room an Appalachian hill-country touch.

For more than a decade, we vowed to redo it. We had vague plans sketched out. We did nothing, though, year after year, as the refrigerator freckled with rust and the fake butcher-block Formica counter gently pulled away from the backsplash behind the faucet.

But like a log lazing down the river to the waterfall, things are coming to a head. We got an architect. She drew an exquisitely detailed set of plans. ("You got an architect?!" huffed the designer at a Bridgeport kitchen showroom: "What do architects know about kitchens? ")

We tore pages out of kitchen magazines and glossy catalogs. We interviewed contractors. We looked at slide-in stoves. And countertops. And, good Lord, an endless forest of solid-insert, Shaker-framed cabinets.

Unless you've been there - like pretty much everyone we know - it's hard to imagine the nuanced jargon and intricacy of the cabinet world. I thought we'd just get Smallbone, the handmade English cabinetry I saw once in dewy, rustic photographs of upscale kitchens. This was before I was clued in to the price.

I will not bore you with the details of our adventures in cabinetland. Let me say only that I discovered that you can get drawers with pneumatic brakes. That "reversed raised inserts" are sturdier than veneer. That you can't get a "classic" morel painted surface on Medallion's Central Park West line, only a distressed "heirloom" look, or failing that a "vintage" surface, which implies age, but far more gracefully.

I'll skip a discussion of the pros and cons of routed corners, molding shapes and stock versus semi-custom.

Unless you insist.

*

Now that the fat is in the fire, a strange and unexpected emotion has been welling up.

The flaws of our Ugly Betty of a kitchen are beginning to look a lot like charm; the irritants like endearing quirks.

The other night, after my wife went to bed, I stood in the silent space, saying my good-byes.

It was at that warped Formica counter that our granddaughter first stood on a chair and whisked eggs for her breakfast sandwiches. On the rack behind the stove, the potholders dangled like Christmas stockings - curling hand-knit squares, a quilted pumpkin job, a Panamanian-folk-stitched mitten charred near the thumb, accidental ornaments. I'm going to miss the nicked-up, cast-aluminum Lucky Club bottle-opener screwed to the door jamb.

Our dinner parties always started out here, guests crammed in. I chopped onions for the beef stew with prunes here. Negotiated the layout so easily I could put together supper sliding back and forth on a stool when I was on crutches.

Now three tomatoes posed next to the fire-glazed crock that holds the spray of wooden spoons, a kitchen haiku suddenly pleading for time.

*

We have become, finally, the kind of people we used to avoid, consumed with kitchen-chat.

It is not helping our blood pressure. A neighbor feels betrayed by an appliance at the top of our list - her new-fangled KitchenAid dishwasher: "It can't even get a colander clean! "

Another friend, encountered at the Narberth SEPTA station, bemoans the porosity of her soapstone counter, purchased from the quarry in Vermont. She wonders if local kitchen suppliers might offer tighter, finer-milled surfaces.

Scary contractor experiences (as well as a few happy ones) are exchanged. Long lag times lamented. Costs compared: A 24-inch-shallow refrigerator that goes for more than I paid for college tuition seems not out of bounds.

I find myself looking at the Web image of a copper farmhouse sink that lists for $2,700, and seriously thinking that it might not be so awful to pay a few hundred extra to have it pre-aged to take off the shine.

So it has been going on the otherwordly eve of demolition, part of me wallowing in sentiment, the other part abandoning all earthly reason.

Then on Friday our contractor injected a note of reality, surveying the old kitchen's clutter like a surgeon about to cut off a limb: "You're gonna need boxes," he said.