I’ve heard veterinarians equate human years to dog years.

They say if you multiply your pooch’s chronological age by seven years you’ll come up with the dog’s equivalent age if he or she were human. In other words, a two-year-old dog is actually a teenager rather than a toddler. Your seventeen-year-old Maltese, were she transfigured into human form, would look less like a Kardashian supermodel and more like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane.

If one dog year equals seven human years, then one kitchen year is equivalent to three human ones. Almost nothing lives life harder or shows its age quicker than a kitchen. I can guarantee your twenty-year-old kitchen is looking in the mirror thinking she could use a bit of Botox on her forehead and wondering how in the heck her neck got a little soft.

Kitchens are resilient and sadly, we can no longer rely on a kitchen to actually wear out before it’s time to replace it. In the last couple of decades, we’ve learned how to make kitchen surfaces so darn durable. My mom worried about her laminate tops lasting through her grandson’s Hot Wheels phase. Now, a quartz countertop could substitute for the blacktop at the Indy 500 and still be chip-free and shiny when they waved the checkered flag. If you’re standing around waiting for a non-mechanical part of your old kitchen to wear out, you’re going to be standing around until the end of time.

Replacing your old hardware and refreshing your tasteful decorator items go only so far to give a kitchen a lift. Marie Kondo’s Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up can quite literally change your life when it comes to your wardrobe or your magazine collection or your overabundance of spatulas. But it falls far short for creating a room that increases your home’s value rather than depressing it.

Home trends and fashion itself have taken their toll on your poor kitchen. What looked positively swanky and fresh fifteen years ago looks tired and saggy now. ‘Maturity’ is a terrific word when applied to landscaping or the behavior of a professional basketball team out the locker room, but it’s the kiss of death if it describes your kitchen.

Walking into the most important room in your home should make your heart sing. And it should make the hearts of your family and friends sing. Your kitchen is man and woman’s best friend, so give the old girl the total makeover she needs. If she was a dog, she would lick your face.