The kitchen fitter finished just before 9pm this evening.
We now have more fridge than we’ve ever had, our first ever dishwasher, an oven with a timer, and a built in hob – no more pasta and veg falling down the side of the cooker!

Space Kitchens have now done all they’re going to do.  The units, worktops, cupboards and appliances are all fitted and they work.

Over to us to do the rest.  We have to decorate and put up shelves up, mask some of the less than ideal bits of kitchen which are left.

We have slightly fewer cupboards than before, so I now have to figure out what kitchen stuff I’m keeping and what not.  I was effectively the last one out of several shared houses, so I’ve got all sorts of leftover bits and pieces that no-one else took – baking trays, cutlery, and the like.  I have loads of things like spatulas and fish slices and so on.  Time to rationalise.  Maybe even time to discard all the old ones and invest in a new set that match.

As well as putting up shelves, I’m interested in space-saving kitchen ideas too.  My saucepans are all pretty dreadful – I inherited a decade-old set of matching non-stick pans when I left home 10 years ago, which have served me pretty well until now.  Over the last year, I knackered the largest by leaving it on an electric hob and burning something into the base so badly I couldn’t clean it.  A little later, and the handle just fell off the smallest.  So I really only have one pan left.  My new set are going to be dishwasher-proof and probably will hang on the wall.
I am looking forward to using the oven with the timer. You can set the time you want the oven to finish, and the length of cooking time, and it works out the start time.  So no more “Christmas dinner at 5pm” misery – I can set the bird to come on automatically in the middle of the night and not have to get up at the crack of dawn to turn the oven on!

Look at how smoothly the new kitchen drawers work!

With thanks to my glamorous assistant.

Well, the kitchen is coming along nicely.

The fridge-freezer and dishwasher arrived on Monday. Our new fridge-freezer, which 990mm tall, and contains many litres of storage space is actually less heavy than our current, centuries old 2 cu ft freezer!

The kitchen was delivered on Wednesday. It over filled the sitting room to the point where it was practically impossible to get into the room, and certainly not possible to sit. Or store the contents of the kitchen cupboards on the dining room table, as planned.

Shortly after all those thousands of boxes were delivered, I took a call.

“Hi Mr Foster – we’re planning to start on Monday, is that OK?”

Erm, not really. You told me previously it was going to be Thursday. I can’t move around in my house with all the boxes filling my entire ground floor. Let alone go another five days living off the few utensils that are still left in the kitchen.

“Sorry, Mr Foster, that’s when the guys are available.”

Grr. Oh, well. It gives me plenty more time to pack up the kitchen cupboards, tidy, clean, etc. We don’t use the sitting room all that much, anyway. Specially at weekends (!)

Then this morning at 09:05am I took a call.

“Hi Mr Foster – would you mind if we came this morning after all?”

WHAT????? I haven’t packed the cupboards, emptied the room, removed the tiles from the wall or anything.

“Oh, that’ll be ok. We’ll be there in an hour.”

Eep. Frantic kitchen packing.

Fitter arrives at 09:35. Lots of grumbling. Can’t BELIEVE the kitchen. The designer has left plans that JUST WON’T WORK. TWO DAYS? Yeah, if I was a four-man team. (Eh? You couldn’t fit a four man team in the bloody kitchen!). Long phone conversations. No, we can’t put the dishwasher there, it will be in front of the stop tap. The sink can’t possibly be directly below an electric socket. You’re just not going to fit those units in that space. What do you mean it’s been measured by three different people?  Oh, well, they’re not fitters.
All the while, I am still frantically trying to put the contents of my cupboards into boxes.

About 20 minutes later, all the wall cupboards are empty and I’ve run out of packing crates. I move onto filling bags, and while I’m still packing away, he starts to take cupboards off the wall. Which is a fairly impressive sight. Crash, bang wallop, all gone.  The tiles just drop off through a practised claw-hammer action.  I don’t even own a claw hammer!
I’m hoping if he’s got as far as trashing the old kitchen he now believes he can at least fit the new one.

OH MY WORD, look at that! The old tall cupboard is sitting on two bricks. Not the like the neoprene feet the new kitchen will have. The wall between kitchen and dining room just plasterboard and low quality battens. (Hmmm… thinks… we could have a totally open plan downstairs… if only we’d thought of that before we forked out for a kitchen.)

Eventually, I’d chaotically packed up everything and scattered it around the house – on the landing, in the bedroom, up the stairs, on the windowsills – and the kitchen continued to be removed.

When I came back from work – I was impressed! He’s made quite a lot of progress today.

And we can already use the sitting room slightly, and tomorrow, it will be much better. The fitter has threatened promised to turn up at 7am, and finish the job tomorrow if he possibly can, even if it means stopping til midnight. He wants the weekend off. We shall see.

For comparison purposes, here are the CAD drawings of the new kitchen alongside photos taken in January of the existing kitchen.

NB, kitchen is now WAAAAAY more cluttered than it was in January because we have had to shift so much out of the lean-to in preparation for the washing machine installation. There’s an awful lot of bottles waiting for recycling.

Bloody CADman doesn’t find the walls get in the way of the POV shot!

So it’s the case that when one (washing machine) door opens, another closes.

We’ve had the washing machine a day. I’ve done two loads, but P went to the laundrette last week and doesn’t have enough laundry yet. (We have different ideas about colour separation and what constitutes a load, so I’m not allowed to do his washing.)

I need to do a third load, but there’s nowhere left in the house for wet laundry.

In other house news, the kitchen engineer (distinct from the designer) came around today. He left colour printouts of the CADed design. But that wasn’t good enough for me. I insisted he leave JPGs as well!

New kitchen pics

The guy said that the woman he saw yesterday is having her new kitchen put in on the 11 Dec, so maybe the before Christmas claim is credible after all.

There are down sides. We have to do some of the preparation. The kitchen firm won’t do anything like floor coverings, tiling or walls, or put in shelves or additional electric sockets so we’ll probably need lots of extra help once it’s done. And jiminy, they’ll be here so soon! There’s loads we need to do first, including clearing the kitchen, removing things from the walls. And buying appliances in time for them to fit.

And we still won’t get to find out what’s under the plasterboard in the kitchen.

A salesman cold called us 1pm on Sunday.  Designer turned up 8pm.  Stayed all night.  Measured kitchen while we watched Torchwood.  Gave very reasonable quote, promised to instal new kitchen before Christmas.  Will get rid of old kitchen, which is rare amongst kitchen people, in our experience.

We signed at 1230am.

Are we mad?  all the characteristics of a hard sell.  But it seemed like a decent deal… Googling the Space Kitchens gets some good reviews and some bad ones.  And some tips we should have known before talking to the guy as well as the ones that we figured out for ourselves.

Still… we could be cooking Christmas dinner in a new kitchen…

One of the things we knew we had to do with the house was redo the kitchen, and as a part of that, we were going to find room for a washing machine.

Circumstances change, and we’re not going to be able to redo the kitchen as soon as we had hoped. P can’t live without a washing machine (I quite like my weekly frequent trips to the laundrette – they give me a chance to read trashy fiction)

So, we’re trying to install a washing machine in a former downstairs loo cupboard. When the loo was removed, all the plumbing and electrics were too, so we’ve had to put in new sockets and new water pipes and new waste water pipes.

Today, the plumber who drilled holes through the brick warned us that the bricks are not in terribly good condition, and even suggested we get the surveyor back to advise. They shatter when drilled, which apparently bricks shouldn’t do, and the mortar is missing, and they don’t appear to be supporting any weight.

So, now, although we finally have pipes and power, we need get the structural issues looked at before we can actually put a washing machine in. Bah.

We have finally got around to getting lampshades from a variety of sources.  At last, every bare bulb in the house is covered and we have a variety of interesting light sources in our lounge/diner. It’s been exhausting trawling around various budget shade shops in the city this afternoon, but we’re finally more or less happy with everything we have.

Except the table lamp in the lounge.  We’re close; we have the shade we want, but we’re still searching for a really suitable lamp base.  So we’ll let it sit on a bedside lamp for now and maybe go antiquing in the Spring for a character base to sit the shade on in the fulness of time.

Today a nice young man came round and insulted my loft.