Washing up in the bath

Gradually our house is coming together, the ideas we have nursed all along as to colour and style are now being put into effect and we are seeing for the first time how it all works.

The latest job we are getting stuck into is to lay a laminate floor all across our Space, starting in one corner and working piece by piece across the room. This is a massive job and although not the first time we have laid a floor of this type, the sheer size of the room, a distance of more than six and a half metres from window to window, does demand a different technique, and a bit of teamwork. One of the tricks I am learning, slowly, is to miss my thumb when tapping the laminate sheets into position. I have a small rubber hammer and a swelling that feels even larger as evidence of this.

In order to fit the floor across the whole room we have to take out a kitchen, one fitted years ago and no doubt being the pride of the owner who had it fitted. In a short morning’s work Kate and I dismantled every piece, this involving a good deal of destruction, a tearing apart of what we could not easily disassemble. Kitchen units are rarely assembled with deconstruction in mind - fastening screws are hidden, sealant or glue is often used and on ours, even where the screws were accessible, time had left its mark by seizing many in place. There were water pipes to be dealt with, some to be disconnected and others to be unthreaded from where they passed through the worktop but there is no point in being too precious about something that is going to end up on the tip. Having made space to swing the hammer, next to go were the wall tiles, chips of broken earthenware flying under my blows. By lunch time the air was filled with dust (again) but the tiles had moved from the kitchen wall to plastic bags in the back yard.

But wait! What has happened to the sink, the cooker and oven? How do we feed ourselves now? What about a cup of tea – how do we do even this?

We still have a kettle so water is drawn from an outside tap just beneath the kitchen window and we sit down with a brew to consider our position. Fortunately my inventive partner has planned all this down to the last detail. We still have a microwave oven and we still have a freezer full of food so at least we won’t go hungry. It seems she has everything sorted except for the washing up – with no sink we’ll soon be running out of clean plates.

Fear not, worried reader, for the solution is at hand. Scarcely having removed the dirt of the day from my body with a nice relaxing soak, Kate is knocking at the bathroom door with a bowl of dishes for washing up.