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.