Progress report

Smelly Socks and Garden Peas

May 24

I may have mentioned that we're in the midst of some major renovations at home.

We aren't even at the half way point yet but I thought I'd share some pictures of the progress so far.

Before

My hated kitchen... it wasn't hugely aesthetically offensive, but it was incredibly badly designed, awkward and the workmanship of the fitting left quite a lot to be desired. The cupboard doors were all wonky, the fridge door dropped random bits of metal and the bottle tray in its door was held in with gorilla glue. The kick boards had horrid blue LED lights set into them that worked their way forward on a regular basis, the fix was to hit them with a wooden spoon to slot them back in.

Some idiot had placed the dishwasher on the other side of the kitchen from the sink. There was plenty of space next to the sink, but no, the opportunity to avoid dripping water across the kitchen from rinsed dishes was clearly best ignored by the previous residents.

The oven stack was right next to the (actually excellent) hob and then there was very little space before the sink. So, while you could prepare food at the other side of the sink, you couldn't do that and stop pans from boiling over or sticking. So I always ended up chopping veg in the 60cm of surface between the hob and the pile of washing up.

And then there was the tiling: cream and floor to ceiling, making the room dark and bizarrely sticky.

The worst was the artex ceiling, painted a delicate shade of hospital green with the scars of old light fittings rendering it unarguably dingy.

I spent almost 8 years hating that kitchen, can you tell?

Ripped out

The builders ripped out the kitchen very early on, they needed to get under the floor to put down some concrete pads for posts to hold up massive steel beams.

It was amazingly quick work, the units, floor and tiles all came out in a couple of days, swiftly followed by the ceiling.

Behind the tiles we found wall paper and the most amazing, er I mean ugly, shiny brown tiles.

All gone

Not long after that, the walls came down. The outside wall, the wall between the kitchen and dining rooms, the wall between the dining and living rooms.

The wall between the living room is going back up with a door in a new place. Then a utility is going roughly where I was standing for that picture and the rest, plus 2m further out, will be my kitchen diner. Mine, all mine!

But right now, the back wall is held up with poles and we've got at least another 8 weeks of cooking in the garage.