Since my plumbing problems are fixed, and at a much lower cost than I anticipated, I now have my in-laws working on completing our dirty kitchen and laundry room with the money I didn't have to spend on fixing the plumbing. Even the wall that was damaged has been repaired and repainted. I don't expect the added-on rooms to be 100 percent completed, though, until a couple of weeks from now because I don't have enough to pay for the roofing.

What's a Dirty Kitchen?

I've been asked this question enough times that I've decided to explain it. Filipinos, of course, know exactly what I'm talking about. It's Americans in the US and people in other places that seem to get confused. I won't bother to explain what a laundry room is because I haven't met a person in my entire life who didn't know what that was.

It's actually very simple. Most Americans, who have their own homes and even some who live in apartments, do all of their outdoor cooking on their patios or in the back yards or places like that. It happens like that in the Philippines too, but the dirty kitchen is designed to be a separate room from the house and used for cooking things that have strong odors or produce a lot of smoke — and things of that nature.

Cooking fish, for example, can produce a variety of odors you don't want to be smelling for days or weeks later because you cooked it inside the house. The odors get absorbed by everything cloth and then some. There are some really stinky things being cooked around here, like dried fish.

Our Reasons for a Dirty Kitchen

We could have had it added on when we had our house built, but the contractor wanted way too much for something that should be simple. I don't need a dirty kitchen and laundry room add-on which looks as good as the house. It needs to be well-ventilated and semi-enclosed and that's about it.

Our kitchen stove is an electric range, with a range hood above it. It works just fine for cooking everything we eat. Of course, we're stuck when there's an extended power outage. We will have a propane stove in the dirty kitchen as a backup as well as for cooking the stinky stuff.

When my wife's sisters get involved in the cooking ordeal, my regular kitchen just isn't big enough — she has six sisters all trying to do something at the same time. Tomorrow's Thanksgiving Day dinner will be a prime example.

What about the Laundry Room?

My wife insisted on a laundry room separate from the dirty kitchen, but I really don't see the point. Why not just have the laundry room and the dirty kitchen combined? She says it's because she doesn't want any of her family messing with the washing machine or dryer, but I suspect it's more than that.

Granted, my in-laws don't know how to take care of anything electronic. I've seen enough ruined washing machines (the cheap kind) and DVD players destroyed (along with televisions) for myself to know that much.

I think it has to do more with the fact that my wife's more "Americanized" than I am, which is odd since she was born and raised here and I wasn't. Of course, she's made it a point (on more than once occasion) to tell me she lived in the US for more years of her life than the Philippines.

Anyway, there you have it. In a couple of weeks, we'll have our dirty kitchen and laundry room completed. Still, we are far from being done with everything we need to do and I'll talk about that later on — perhaps in a month or two.

• Is it a Kitchen Stove or a Kitchen Range?
• My Custom Kitchen — Cabinets, Cupboards, Counters and Electricity
• Building Our House in the Philippines
• I want a Real Office Desk to Replace my Crappy Computer Desk
• We're Replacing our Window Blinds with Window Curtains