Day 32 of kitchen building…

On the 17th of July, two bright-eyed , bushy-tailed shiny little souls started building a kitchen.

Like all adventurers setting off on a voyage of discovery, they were nervous but hopeful.

Little did they realise that a month from that fateful date they still wouldn’t be finished. This is their story…

Ok, so that’s a tad dramatic… but a month! It’s been a month already? Oh bugger!

I guess we’ve made lots of progress for people who’ve been fitting this in around work, a holiday, more work, getting another flat ready for selling and whatever else we’e been up.

First of all, we’ve made and put up all the cabinets. We’ve installed (with a bit of help from an electrician friend) the oven and induction hob. We have lights were there were none before. There’s new plugs, a new extractor fan, a new fridge and a new freezer. And a heck of a lot of dust!

(This is our new oven… I like how he looks like he’s smiling. But I like that he cooks our food even more!)

BUT… the worktop isn’t arriving until the middle of September so we can’t put the flooring down until after then. Bummer.

And we’ve had to enlist help building our kitchen island. We were pretty confident we could build this ourselves… until we realised that as a kitchen island is a non-standard thing, you don’t get any instructions for it. At all. Ikea just give you some huge lengths of end panels and that’s it. Try as we might we’ve not been able to make sense of how those end panels are meant to translate into an island. So we’ve got a joiner round to quote for it but he can’t do the work until 2 weeks from now. Drat.

There’s also a 30cm wide space on one side that we can’t decide what to do with. Ikea don’t have a wall cabinet in that size with our door. We had thought of getting a corner type shelf thing but went off the idea.

So any suggestions for what to do with the space would be gratefully received. I’ve been thinking of using it for something statementy but I’ve no idea what yet.

Other things we haven’t decided what to do with yet include our Superman splashback that we had for the sink… He’s about 120cm wide but the wall space on the sink side is now 210cm so he doesn’t quite work anymore – but we’ve got used to him moodily staring at our dirty dishes so if we can figure out a way to keep him, we will.

However there have been some rather joyful discoveries of having a proper kitchen (or at least proper kitchen cabinets) for the first time in nearly 2 years… I now have a little drawer just for my tea!

Yes, it’s a bit indulgent but by god I do love my tea! It’s also been great to put all our things on shelves again. Strange how something so simple can feel like such a huge step! The heart mugs are ones the OH made me as a present back in 2004, while the happy rainbow cup was one I found for him in a charity shop. (Yes, his real name isn’t actually OH!)

It’s also been so nice to rediscover some things that have been packed away for aaaaaaaaages… like my babycham glasses. (Can you tell I have a habit of collecting things?)

Of course our diy hasn’t been limited to just the kitchen (because we’re crazy like that)… we also put up our Mini Moderns wallpaper in the hall.

It’s now one of the first things you see when you come into our flat… and it just makes me feel ridiculously happy. (Badgers to do that to me for some reason!)

However two members of our household have not been such fans of the month-long diy-athon…

Grey ninja suit cat has been giving us this look a lot… we translate this as I command you to stop drilling, hammering, painting etc and pay attention to me!

While our owl-fox cat – who has a more nervous disposition (she freaks out and hides when anyone rings the doorbell) – has taken to her bed.

Wait, did I say her bed? I meant, our bed. (Why do cats act like they own everything and somehow convince you that they do too?)

We expect a full recovery from her sometime mid-September… around the same time we think we’ll have a finished kitchen.

If it’s not finished by then, I may take to my bed too!