Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Bad Blogger.

I'm sorry, I'm a bad blogger. You know how it is when you've been going through a stressful period and you can talk about nothing else, then it's over and suddenly the stress has gone and you want to just stop thinking about it all? That was the kitchen. Yeah, I know it hardly flickers on the Richter scale of real stressful events, but I'm not great with stress these days. So sorry. I do have pictures and will post them soon. In the meanwhile, can I just mention that I haven't even been knitting much apart from on one little sock? Nope, what I've been doing is eating, lol. When I get stressed, I eat. This is not only pointless, the results are annoying when you come out of the grey patch.

However bad patch over and hopefully I'll get my knitting mojo back before SkipNorth, which is only nine days away now. In fact I'm sure I'll make a rapid recovery as soon as I get in the car and we start heading south, lol. And I am going to be visiting the new K1 in Edinburgh before that too, hopefully in the company of Jean and Helen, two infinately more accomplished and dedicated knitters than I, who both live locally but whom I have not met other than virtually yet.

In the meantime, can I ask a favour of all of you reading this? Some of you may know that Hubby lectures in Media Studies over at Stirling Uni, and it's that time of year again when he runs a module on the internet, blogging and all that sort of stuff. He's set up a fake blog here, and what he would like is if as many folk as we can muster together just click across to it so as to gather some hits on the statcounter. Then he can show his innocent little students how the international power of blogging works, lol. You don't need to leave a comment, just click over. I recall we all did this last year, and even Hubby was impressed by the worldwide distribution of bloggers that visited his test site then!

Thanks!

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Kitchen # 3.

I think it's starting to look a lot better, don't you?



Ignore the strange streaky effect on the walls. Wet patches like that usually mean running damp, but in this case it's the nice new plaster drying out. Ignore the fact that we still lack doors, shelves, drawers, kickplates, skirting, tiles, cooker hood and sundry other details. Look! There's a cooker hob and oven down there and they work. The sink is in and it works too. Amazing....I even cooked in there last night. Real food at last!

We were hoping it would be finished by Friday. In fact the joiners didn't come on Friday because there was no point in the plumber trying to fit the gas and water appliances at the same time as two joiners were trying to fit all the rest, not in that space. It is only a 5` x 12` room. So they will be back on Monday (which is a school holiday, eek!) to do everything else except the tiling, which has to wait for a couple of weeks till the plaster is dry. And the painting ditto, but I'll have to do that. Saffron yellow or a pale old gold, I think, to go with the tiles and make the room look warm. Autumn colours.

In the meantime though I am pretty happy. There are a couple of mild irritations but I've got a fair bit of faith in C the joiner and I expect they'll be sorted out, or at least compromised on. In the meantime, admire. As I said, it's a small space but there's a twelve foot long worktop in there and that gives me at least double the working area I had before. Also before I just had a cooker in there, with several badly built and mostly pointless cupboards that held very little except the microwave and the rubbish bin. Now I'll have the oven and hob, a microwave up on the wall, a larder fridge and a dishwasher.




Just take a moment to admire this wonderful piece of german made ...or at least designed.... technology. It's actually stainless steel, but I'm leaving the protective travel film on till all the work is finished.

Okay? Enough admiring? (I could look at it all day.)

Now this last has been a bit of a epiphany for me. It's only been here 12 hours and already I've used it three times. I've never had a dishwasher before, unless you count the mostly unreliable low tech model that took a day to wash a sink of dishes and moaned about that. Much marital strife will be avoided now the dishwasher has arrived! It's got ecowash and a 30 minute programm and everything comes out genuinely clean, compared to the quality control problems of before. Love it to bits.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Kitchen # 2.

The saga continues......

Monday evening.



Tuesday evening...



This evening.



It's beginning to look...well, like it might be a kitchen again one day?



There has been some discussion about the tiles for the splashback. Initially I thought we should have something classic in black and white to go with the worktops, but then got seduced by this colour in the tile shop. I think it will warm the place up, not to mention go with my Le Creuset pots. Hubby says it's clearly an orange coloured tile, btw. But I say any fool (or woman) can tell its not orange, its Pumpkin. (That's what it says on the back anyway.)



Theo does not care. He has spent the last week and a half here, in my daughter's bed under her dressing gown. He does not care if the tiles are orange or Pumpkin. (Cats are colour blind.) He just wants the nasty dirty mess to be finished and these men gone from his house.



Cats are smart.

Monday, February 04, 2008

Dust...and my kitchen.

This is what my kitchen used to look like, about a year ago. Small, but it had shelves, walls, water......it was pretty scruffy though and doors had a habit of falling off. Plus it was a home-made job and some of the unit constuction was, frankly, weird.





Last year about this time we had the nasty plastic windows throughout replaced with traditional sash and case ones, but double glazed this time. In the case of the kitchen windows this meant we ended up with at least twice the glass area, but the downside was that the upper level cabinets had to come off the walls to allow this. ?? Well, remember what I said about weird units? The person who constructed these had decided to use the window frames as an integral method of support. So when the frames came down, so did the units, plus a considerable quantity of wall.



And so it remained for about a year, while we did other things like put in new central heating. I didn't really mine because there's plenty of storage space out in my magnificent pantry, plus the light was so good it made the whole room a pleasure to be in.

All this changed on Monday, when the builders tore out the upper (obsolete) water tank, ripped out the units and removed yet more wall.






This was, I have to say, a low point, because everything just looked horrible. Looking back though at least we hadn't got to the really dusty part. I was just contending with ordinary dust. We had managed to confine that to the kitchen and adjoining dining room. Bit after the destruction came the replastering. And plaster is very dusty stuff to mix. It's everywhere in the house...and I do mean that.

However the good point about replastering was that we got some walls back again.



Though it still looked pretty terrible.



We're onto the second week now and the utilities have been moved, so things are improving. I even saw a kitchen unit going past the study door this morning so perhaps it's going to start looking less like a very narrow corridor and more like a kitchen soon. It is a small space, have to admit. It's only five feet wide and twelve feet long so an L-shaped galley kitchen is the only option. But if you look at my "before" photo at the start of this post, you'll see a lot can be squeezed into this area.

It's never going to have the same views as my trailer tent kitchen though...