Well, what with all the rain and everything, I’ve barely ventured out this weekend. I’ve had a lovely relaxing time playing with my computer, watching The Sopranos for the first time, and, this afternoon, adding the Wii numbers of 30 or so acquaintances from a gay social networking site to my own Wii in the hope of increasing the numbers of Miis in my Parade.

Saturday evening was also spent with friends and their six-month old baby, which was lovely.

So, not a whole lot done, as far as I’m concerned. P however was determined to achieve something with his time off, and kept indoors by the weather turned his thoughts to DIY. Emboldened by friends of ours who have recently removed a stone fireplace, and colleagues of his who lent him a big hammer and chisel combo, he set to work on our own stone fireplace.

This is what was there when we moved in:

It was rather more cluttered by the time P removed it! The woodburner is electric, but the flue is real.

This was halfway through. It was a surprisingly quiet process – I was upstairs and didn’t hear much more than tapping.

Here’s a closeup of the rather delightful wallpaper revealed in the process:

And here’s what it looked like when he was done.

The sofa didn’t quite fit, but is probably going to stay there, because the room feels an awful lot bigger now! The ugly flue pipe is mostly gone. There is a remaining cosmetic job to do to remove the box at the top and repaper the bottom half. The previous owners actually left a couple of spare rolls of wallpaper that match, so that shouldn’t be too difficult.

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!