“. . . devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the most comforting and comfortable room in the house.”
~ Elizabeth David (1914-1992)
from French Country Cooking
The Muldowney kitchen revamp has officially started! After three years of umming and ahing we’ve bitten the bullet and are going for it. No longer will I have to wedge a weeks worth of groceries into a fridge that has the cubic capacity of a small shoe-box (years of playing Tetris are a great help with this). Gone will be the days of having to manually nudge forward the dial on the washing machine for EVERY load of laundry in fear of shrunken, doll-sized jumpers. Oh god, and then there’s the floorboards; floorboards that with every step, no matter how light and/or dainty, will give an earth-shuddering creak, like some exceptionally loud and cranky haunted house. Everything’s going to be shining and clean and new and I will wear a frilly-apron and flit from appliance to appliance with a big toothpaste-smile and fairy-soft hands. I can’t wait!!
In the mean time though, there’s the awkard inconvenience of actually GETTING IT DONE. It’s a BIG job, and there’s not one thing worth keeping – everything must go! I’ve been doing the sums, adding it up in oh so many ways; with two differnent calculators and even by hand with a pen and paper, but it always adds up to e-x-p-e-n-s-i-v-e. Somehow though I have a feeling that the spending of the cash is going to be the easy bit!!
I’ve found though, that I’m getting a little obssessive about money and also about kitchen things. If I go to the shops, rather than seeing prices in pounds and pence, I now see its equivilant value in kitchen appliances and accessories. I saw a fabulous red coat that I loved, it was GREAT, it really was, but I couldn’t bring myself to even try it on as it was the same price as a stainless steel splashback, and I really want a stainless steel splashback!
Another thing that has come out of all this is a whole new avenue of shopping that I never knew existed. For instance, I now need to shop for tiles. TILES! They have whole shops filled with them you know; just tiles and tile accessories – nothing else! I’m not even going to mention prices here, especially of those gorgeous coloured glass mosaic tiles I saw; let’s just say I could get a fabulous red coat for every day of the WEEK for the same price!!
And handle shopping, that’s an eye-opener! The money they want for a cupboard handle is astonishing. However it’s worth pursuing as it means I get to shout out “Mark, I’m off to look at knobs!” when we’re in the DIY store. Oh yes, hours of fun!
And so, the quest has begun. They say it’s not about the arriving but about the journey, but I don’t think this rule applies to large-scale DIY projects. Luckily I have the excuse of being stuck in an office all day and therefore have NO opportunity to ‘get my hands dirty’, even if I wanted to. However… husbands who work from home get to do manual labour along with kitchen fitting experts (and make lots of tea). I on the other hand get to point at pictures in fabulous kitchens magazine and simply turn up in the evening to see the gradual transformation – and go “woohoo”!
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