Nancy Fisher is exceedingly patient.
“Maybe I’m too patient,” she laughs.
Her kitchen remodeling project started three years ago. She finished it — a few weeks ago.
Fisher, 62 and the mother of three, has lived close to 10 years in her northwest-side, 1,800-square-foot slump block home. She never liked the kitchen. Very basic and way too ‘80s — and not in a good way — the kitchen sported royal-blue Formica countertops, low ceilings, and don’t even get Fisher started on the drawers.
“You couldn’t pull the drawers all the way out because then they would come right out,” says Fisher, who does accounting work.
A former graphic designer with plenty of home DIY projects under her belt, Fisher began mulling an idea after her daughter Gabriela Fleming graduated from Northern Arizona University and came home to Tucson, lugging a massive collection of bottle caps. Fisher decided to create an accent wall in the kitchen with the caps. Using Liquid Nails to stick the metal rounds onto the wall, she made a 3-foot-by-3-foot section.
“Then, that kind of sat there,” Fisher says.
And sat, and sat.
Slowly, Fisher would add more caps here and there. When her son, Rey Fleming — who owns a landscaping and handyman business — tackled her kitchen last year, she fully committed to the caps. About 6,500 of them cover the walls.
“It’s very relaxing,” Fisher says of the process of adhering them, which usually took place while Netflix episodes of “Sons of Anarchy” played in the background. “It was a stress reliever.”
She didn’t measure, just eye-balled it and occasionally used tinsnips to cut caps in half so they’d fit. At first glance, the circular pieces of metal look like tile surrounded by white grout. Look closer, and you realize they’re bottle caps, mostly from beer, with some Coca-Cola and Fanta caps thrown in. Though Fisher enjoys the occasional brewski, she didn’t up her beer intake just to finish the project. Instead, her friends and kids collected them — even from as far away as Europe. Her son, Carlos Fleming, is in the Army and stationed in Baumholder, Germany. He and his wife, Danielle, sent some home to Fisher every time friends or family visited.
“They’d be walking and they’d pass some place serving beer, and she’d go in and ask them” for bottle caps, Fisher said of her daughter-in-law.
You can buy bottle caps on eBay, but Fisher didn’t spend a penny for any of hers. She figures the kitchen cost her about $800 since Rey not only worked for free, but also salvaged a lot of the parts used in the remodel. The corrugated metal was left over from a fencing project in Fisher’s yard, while the countertops came from friends redoing their own place. A brand-new sink, still in the box, was just $30 at a yard sale.
Fisher adores her new kitchen.
“It’s a pleasure to go in there and cook,” she says. “It feels so much brighter.”
With the kitchen out of the way, she figures she’ll tackle a fireplace treatment and finish up a partly constructed retainer wall in the back. She has no more plans for bottle caps, but can’t seem to shake her cap-collecting habit.
“If I see one, I still have to pick it up,” Fisher laughs. “We were at Tania’s Mexican Food on Grande. I saw they had a place where you could open the Coca-Cola bottles. There were 10; I put them in my purse. I don’t need them, but I had this urge. I don’t have anything planned, but you never know.”
