I've told you about my father in past posts.  He was a wonderful musician and played the violin.  When Babajan would come home from work, he would get comfortable, and if dinner wasn't quite ready yet, he would grab his violin, stand in the center of the kitchen, and play...sometimes Vivaldi, sometimes Bach, sometimes just some amazing gypsy violin, but it would be in the kitchen.  Inevitably, my mom would tell him he was underfoot.  "Varouj," she'd say, "go play in the dining room.  You're right in the middle of everything!  Vodkee dag es!"  To which he would say that the kitchen is the soul of the house.  It's the center.  "This is where it all happens, Anne!"If you own a home, or even if you don't own a home but are lucky enough to have a roof over your head, the chances are great that you have a kitchen, right?  What makes this room of the house so important?  It's where the food is prepared to nourish the family.  If you happen to have a table or counter or counter to eat on, it's often where the family gathers for meals, sharing what happened in their day. And that's also the table where the children gather to do their homework too.  Growing up, the kitchen in our old California craftsman home was always the warmest room of the house.  Something was always cooking in the oven in the evenings.  In the morning, my father would make chai in a pan (even before Starbucks made it popular), steeping a tea bag in water with cloves, cardamom, cinnamon sticks and orange peel.Growing up as an Armenian daughter....and granddaughter, the kitchen was always where I would have to work helping my mom or my grandmother.  There was always work to do there.  Whether I was washing dishes, or folding the clean laundry on the table, or rolling choreg or sarmas there.  It's no wonder that the kitchen is so important to me.  When we bought the house that we're living in now, my kitchen was hardly a showpiece, but coming from living in a 700 sq. foot rock cottage as a single mom to our present home, the kitchen felt HUGE comparitively.  The counters are ceramic tile, and that had it's appeal as well.  My parents' and my grandparents' homes all had tile kitchens.  There was nostalgia there, and for a long time it was fine.  But the man we purchased this house from back in 2007 had flipped it.  Bought it, made some repairs and turned a profit on it.  What he didn't do was seal the grout in the kitchen, and over the past 7 years, the grout has been eroding to the point where ...well...let's just say the situation is not pretty.To regrout or not to regrout...that has been the question.  I'm a pretty good do-it-yourself'er, and I started looking into tools to scrape old grout.  The problem is though, that it's not just the counters, There were some bad areas on the wall behind the sink where I could tell there was water damage. That was something I wouldn't be able to handle.  I talked to my husband about it.  "You do realize this is huge project, right?"  Yes.  I knew that.  But it was also like opening a can of worms, and that's what my trepidation was about.  Okay, so we do the counter.  That doesn't change the fact that the sink (that is so old and scratched it won't come clean any longer) needs to be replaced.  If we were going to change the sink, then we would definitely need new fixtures since the soap pump dispenser built into the sink is yet another thing that's falling apart.  And then there's the garbage disposal which no longer grinds anything but just spins stuff around...that would need to get replaced too.  So you see what I'm saying?  You start, and then it's just ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.  A money pit.But the thing is that when you own a home, you have to maintain it, otherwise it will fall apart around you.  We can't continue with t