Kitchen refit 2

On delivery day the boxes arrived early, on pallets, at barely past nine in the morning. The two men saddled with carrying the heavy packages up from road level to our house clearly wished someone else had been given this particular job. The flooring boxes were particularly heavy, like they were full of lead, but in the end nothing was dropped or damaged, something we are grateful for. Our spare bedroom is now full, totally unusable, but over time this will change.

After day one we had made a small dent in the kitchen box stack.

This shows our progress, just two wall cupboards fastened up, but what this hides is the effort involved in mounting them securely. A plasterboard wall is not designed to take the weight of a cupboard full of crockery so strengthening had to be added in the form of a wooden beam sunk into the wall. This is not a time to stint on strong screws. Our motto is: "Max out on each fixing even though it looks safe".

Our new kitchen is getting fitted in two halves, one side of the room at a time. Side one is the easiest, perhaps, as it doesn't have the sink and also there is less old kitchen to dismantle before the new stuff can go in. But this two stage strategy will also involve laying the new flooring  across the room in two halves. To prepare for this all the new units are first assembled elsewhere in the house so that they are ready to go in as soon as the flooring tiles are fitted, these starting from one wall and going to a line down the centre of the room. When this is done the new kitchen units can be lifted into place, levelled and then secured (more big screws). One of the three metre long worktops currently stored beneath the house will need to be extracted so that it can be sawn to the precise dimensions needed and this is not an easy job since these things are heavyweights. But let us look ahead. When all this is done we will have a working kitchen, half new and half old, so might this be a good time to take a break from the house for a while, a short holiday?

We had delayed starting the internal refit work due to an unusually hot September which made working inside unimaginably uncomfortable but there was still plenty in the garden to occupy us. A little archeological exploration revealed a garden feature previously hidden beneath the long grass.

This stone ringed flower bed emerged into daylight for the first time in decades once the overgrown shrub was hacked back to a few stumps and the meadow that surrounded it was strimmed down. The perfectly cut grass lawn has never been our concept of a nice garden but we do like to know what features lie hidden from us.

One area that will remain totally wild is the pond with its surrounding vegetation and this strategy has already proven successful in attracting a variety of insect life including some of the largest dragonflies on the planet. 

Getting the photographic evidence to support this claim, however, has not been easy. These creatures are fast movers on the wing, constantly darting about at incredible speed. One (barely) successful shot of a yellow bodied beauty was eclipsed by the arrival of an even larger blue dragonfly who returned later with a mate, both beasts being the size of small birds.

They eluded my efforts with the camera however several weeks later we found this beauty lying on the ground beside the pond, the last moments of his life fading away. Dragonflies only live for a few weeks in their adult form.

All this, of course, is a digression from kitchen building. A week has passed, a long time in the world of refit, and we can now boast that we have half a working new kitchen.

The new units are all screwed in place, the worktop pieces fitted and fastened, shelves and drawers assembled and lined up, job done. All that remains is decorating the walls which will be a post refit job.

What we didn't foresee is the long learning curve associated with memorising each item's new storage location. We constantly find ourselves darting in the wrong direction to find a fork, a plate or a tin of rice pudding then pausing for a think, giving our brains a chance to remember which new cupboard to open.

Kitchen refit 1

The previous blog entry did rather spoil the surprise didn't it. The only question that remains is how many more episodes will appear here before it is done.

Let us start with the kitchen floor then, which originally looked like this...

Beneath this, however, was the real horror, vinyl tiles stuck down with an adhesive which leaves a sticky residue on the floor boards beneath.

Scraping and peeling these things up proved very physical (as well as being tough on the knees) but the floor's unevenness across the room made it essential so it had to be done. The horrible sticky residue left behind had to be covered over immediately before it grabbed our feet and then spread to the rest of the house so the job was done section by section then covered immediately with a thin layer of plywood.

This levelled the floor and also formed the base for the flooring we will eventually lay on top, 'Luxury Vinyl' tiles that click together without the use of adhesive.

But of course we can't do that yet. First we must dismantle and remove the existing kitchen units so we can put the new flooring down. And this creates a problem. A kitchen is a workspace which is in use every day. The cooker, for example, sink and refrigerator, will all be in use at some point for each meal we prepare and they cannot easily be moved elsewhere. So this requires a plan. Just like a game of chess there will be a sequence of moves made in the correct order. We decide we must tackle the job in two halves, an imaginary line drawn down the centre of our kitchen, each side being torn apart, upgraded then replaced in the shortest possible time. Simple really. Once we start each section, however, then the clock starts ticking and we must work on, our lives being on hold until that side is done.

So here is the plan for kitchen side one.

Switch off cooker, move it across the room, empty and remove base unit and wall cupboards, move fridge/freezer across the room, clean up, lay flooring, move cooker and fridge back onto new flooring, fit new wall and base cupboards, cut and fit worktops. Job done.

But hold on...we haven't even unpacked the boxes yet.

Pausing the rush

It has been non stop, full on for the last twelve months, right from the moment we decided to sell up and leave the village that was to have been our forever home. That simple decision had us searching the internet at a time when very few suitable properties were on offer but then, quite unexpectedly, we found one we liked. Our offer was accepted almost immediately so we had to move quickly to start  selling our Carradale home. As it turned out this too happened quickly. The To-Do lists grew longer and longer - removers, services, packing - then there's the horrible business of deciding what to take, what to leave, what to sell and what to throw out.

Looking back we try not to dwell too much on the moving day mishaps but suffice to say we landed.

Most people might think that having moved in and unpacked then it would be time to relax, to slow down, time to become acquainted with the neighbours, to explore locally, to learn where the nearby footpaths might take us, all these things done gradually. But this wasn't how we did it. We knew, right from the start, that we would want to change so much about the house we had just bought and that for some of those changes we would need professional help. But involvement with outside contractors meant that we would be tied to their timetable, one that may not fit our own. In an ideal world one might expect to know weeks or even months in advance when work would start, but this is not the world we inhabit. In our world we awake every morning expecting to receive the vital call giving us a start date for one project or another. We dare not go away, holidays are off the agenda, even leaving the house to go shopping is risky. But the call doesn't come. It becomes a mental challenge with no resolution. So we throw ourselves into changing the bits we can do ourselves, right until our physical endurance runs out. I soon realise that I have lost weight, my body tissue having been eaten away by all the physical stuff, hacking away at the bits of house we don't want, moving things from place to place (then sometimes back again), digging up unwanted plants in the garden and hacking back others, the list goes on. A whole three kilogrammes of weight has disappeared from my body. Lost forever?

Morning view from our window

Then finally the end that has been scarcely in sight for so long arrives and suddenly something changes. The list of outsider jobs comes to an end. This does not mean we have finished doing everything we wanted to do to the house, far from it, but it does mean that we are now responsible for and can control the future timetable ourselves, stop and start when we want, even go away and leave the house without worrying that we might miss something. We can get our lives back.

It takes time to adjust to this, however, particularly as the weather outside is un-summer-like. The threat from sudden downpours has us checking the sky every time we go out. 

"That dark cloud looks a little threatening...do we need coats?"

Rainbows come and go like buses (they are never there when you want to photograph them) and the heatwaves that seem to be plaguing the rest of the world have missed Scotland.

We soon realise that summer weather on its own is not the simple cure we seek. We must make a mental adjustment to change from domestic project to chill-out mode. We have a house, it works, so we just have to accept and live with it's temporary imperfections. There's no rush.

Time to replace those lost kilos perhaps.

Evening view from another window

All this is easy to say, of course, but the words 'chill out' are not part of our vocabulary. The kitchen ceiling is done so why not start on the floor? But hold on...we can't replace the flooring without dismantling the kitchen units and ripping out the sink. This is beginning to sound like another big project.