I might want to make Jam and sell it one day and you can’t hide things like this from food hygiene inspectors. They Notice Things. It was time to leap into the world of Getting a New Kitchen.
There were several stages
Kitchen Showrooms
Wander in and Stroke soft-closing cupboards. How can you find things like cheese graters if everything is hidden behind a wall of sleekness?
Never mind lost graters, for only £30,000, magic fairies will whisk this into your house and change your life. Or, in the absence of £30,000…
DIY Shops
Check out your old kitchen units. Realise they are still solid, and the layer of grease can be replaced with a layer of paint. Feel super rich with the £30,000 you have saved and take your credit card on a whirlwind spending frenzy. B&Q, Worktop Express, Flooring World. There is even a shop that sells dishwashers with buttons that work, so you no longer have to push a chopstick in the hole where the switch fell out.
Empty the room
Try telling most of the stuff that it has to be packed away. Tofu squeezers, machines of many parts that chop onions at the same speed as a knife, 10 year old spices, tins of mysterious fish that might be good for you, cracked wooden spoons, half burnt birthday candles that say 46, or 64, rubber bands, string and a trifle bowl. There is an almighty fight wrestling them into boxes and bags. You can hear them screaming. ‘Let me stay out. You will be sorry when someone turns 46 and you can’t find me. How are you going to press the Tofu?’ It is loud and you need a hard heart.
Build a temporary kitchen
Plates, cutlery, microwave and kettle are allowed to hang out in a spare corner and be part of the family. They sit smugly, chattering loudly as you walk past. ‘This will be fun’ they say ‘like camping’.
Look forward to all the fun of making do, but with mains power, a microwave and no damp tent.
Discover More Stuff
So you have your camp kitchen in place and it’s time to start the real business. First off, rip the radiator from the wall.
And reveal a world of lost things that slipped down behind over the years. They are so happy to be out that they all start at once. The glove is promising that it doesn’t leak, Paintbrushes pleased about being ‘just in time for work’ Pen screaming that it still has ink, cloths wanting washing and Christmas hat with FOMO because it missed 15 Christmas dinners. Nobody wants to be thrown away. Even the lanyard reckons it could still get you into Expos if you fancy that.
Restoring Units
They were quite old. We found a delivery note under one of the worktops.
When I was a child, three things happened. ‘Hey Hey we’re the Monkeys’ turned up after school on Tuesdays, I discovered true love with Davie Jones and somebody built these kitchen units. Next week the Monkeys are coming back on TV and I will see Davie again. He is no longer with us, but these units, after 10 cleans and 20 sheets of sandpaper, are still here.
Farewell greasy dirt from decades of dinners, games, parties and laughs. Away with the grease and atmosphere from tense family meals, small children refusing to eat, fights about who left the cake where the dog could get it, or tearful searches for missing hamsters.
Some units could not be saved. It was an emotional moment taking down the vegetable cupboard. All those years of trying to keep fresh food under control but there was always slimy celery or a leaking courgette at the bottom. We discovered a vent to the outside wall so maybe it was built before fridges were invented? That explains how a rat got in that winter night. How we laughed when we finally caught it and released it into the wild. Now our faithful, horrible pit of a rat ridden cupboard was leaving forever.
Rubble Time
The rubble season is the longest part of making a new kitchen. As you pull the units away from the wall…
Everything collapses. We lived two feet away from this stuff and thrived. Maybe thanks to a large gang of earwigs who were living in there and keeping things in order.
Despite the rubble you can try to keep going with the cooker for a week or two.
And learn that a little bit of dust in your dinner goes a long way.
So it is best to give up on the cooker and made more dust scraping up the cork tiles. Discover they were fixed in by a glue sniffer. Decide to save money by not hiring a mechanical tile scraper. So a week later you are still chipping away with a chisel, a bad wrist and clogged up lungs.
First World Problems
Camping in a sitting room for six weeks can wear thin. As noise and dust billow out in thick clouds from the kitchen you are beset by eating disorders. The only nice thing about a ready meal is the picture on the front, yes you can make scrambled eggs in a microwave if you like hard yellow bits wrapped in slime, and dirty dishes take up a lot of space if you don’t have a dishwasher.
None of these things are actually a Real Problem but you can’t help feeling dissatisfied in a spoilt kind of way and there are times when nobody likes anybody else much at all. Whatever is the matter is definitely somebody else’s fault, that much you do know.
And then it all Comes Together
The master plasterer is done and the worktop arrives. Half an oak tree is gently fixed into place.
You keep popping in to see how it is going and every time you have to stroke those worktops to see if that beauty is actually real.
Paint, tiles, sink, tap that shines. The floor will be next, just 72 cork tiles left to go.
Suddenly it is all Done
And you are transported.
From this style..
To this.
It is life changing if you live in it. But I learnt that friends don’t see your kitchen. You can drag them in to admire things as much as you like but all they say is ‘Have you changed the worktop?’ ‘Did you paint it?’ ‘Have you always had that floor?’.
They can’t remember what it was like before and never noticed all the slime, stains and cracks in the first place. Those are the best sort of friends to have.
Time to get out in the sun.
Happy Spring!