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!