Kitchen Kapers

Not content with having the house decorated (which reminds me, I never did get round to posting about the finished nursery and the upside down wallpaper in our bedroom), and new carpet laid (if it ever arrives), we are now about to have a new kitchen fitted. But, as you all know, you can't make an omlette without breaking eggs and a new kitchen going in, means an old kitchen coming out.

I'll be so pleased to see the back of this old kitchen. It was in the house when I first lived here, so I think it's at least ten years old. The style isn't really to our taste - the wooden work surface is fine (although is definitely starting to show its age), but it's the 'orange pine' door fronts and shelves that I will be really glad to get rid of. And the layout of the kitchen doesn't work for us now - hubby thinks that breakfast bars are for young people, and we no longer fall in to that category as the thought of perching on bar stools fills us with dread and the need for ibuprofen to ease the aches and pains. Having said that, I will be a little sad to see the end of the breakfast bar for two very different reasons. One - it was the scene of many a drunken gathering prior to some even more drunken nights out in Reading; it was the bar on which many a Pink Lady was mixed and at which many a Pink Lady was consumed. Two - it has now become a very handy changing table (hygienists amongst you may not wish to consider that sentence for too long.) Oh, how my life has changed.


A friend of ours, who is a kitchen fitter by trade, is going to put in our new kitchen in his spare time, which basically means at the weekend. He predicts it will take him two weekends to get it done, starting on 1 August. So we've now started taking the old kitchen out, bit by bit. First to go were two open corner shelf units - sooooo glad to see the back of them! Followed by the glass-fronted wall cabinet and three other wall cabinets. We put all but two of these units on the path at the front of our house with 'Free to a Good Home' labels, and they all went! We were so pleased about this as it firstly meant hubby didn't have to take them to the tip, and secondly it means they will be being used rather than dumped at the tip, and that is good for our recycling karma.

Then it was the turn of the breakfast bar to be taken to pieces, swiftly followed by several of the base units. And that was how hubby and I spent our Saturday afternoon - in destructive mode.

This afternoon Tim delivered the new kitchen in its flat-pack form, so we are now living in a house with three lengths of work surface on the landing, kick boards propped on the stairs and a lot of boxed cabinets leaning against the wall in the kitchen. The contents of the old kitchen cupboards are in boxes in the middle room, and we are living with just a small portion of the original kitchen in situ. Tim says we'll be without a kitchen sink for a week, which will present a small challenge, but at least there's a sink (albeit the size of a tea cup) in the understairs loo.

Looks like a fine excuse for eating out rather a lot in the next couple of weeks...