Unfitted kitchen

I have stubbed my toe.

It has turned several magnificent shades of purple. Some of them are almost black.

I am feeling very sorry for myself about this. It is still throbbing quite a bit, especially when I put my foot on the clutch. I am having to resist the temptation to take my boots and socks off and look at it, as if it might have become even more spectacularly interesting since I came out to work.

At least it has turned purple. Injuries are always far more satisfying when there is something to look at.

I did it whilst carrying an enormous armful of coats up the stairs and failed to remember that I had left the stool in the way.

I suppose I ought to explain why I was carrying all of our coats upstairs in the first place.

We are going to rebuild our kitchen.

We are going to take down the boot cupboard and un-brick the other door leading into the conservatory and have a kitchen just inside the house instead of in the dark underground hole at the back.

We have been talking about doing this for ages but never done it because of it just being too difficult. It is not at all easy to demolish half of your house and rebuild it somewhere else, especially if you have got no means of making a cup of tea or a piece of toast until you have finished.

Then when Mark was installing some rural broadband he found out that some of the holiday houses at the side of the lake are going to be demolished and rebuilt. Their ground floors filled up with lake in the Great Flood Disaster a few years ago, and the holiday cottage company can’t get insurance for them any more, so they are going to be demolished and rebuilt on stilts.

Their kitchens are not on the ground floor. They are on the first floor, and they are very nice indeed, because they were expensive holiday houses.

They had not been there very long, because the houses were completely refurbished after the flood before, three years earlier, which was when the kitchens were moved upstairs. So much needed replacing that the holiday cottage company thought that they would just scrap the lot and have a completely new interior, and everything was made shiny and new.

There are all sorts of lovely things that are going to be chucked into skips.

We can have anything that we can take out before the skips turn up, and so we are going to have a new kitchen.

We are just going to build it. We are not going to take the old one out at all until the new one is in its gleaming new place.

I am very pleased about this.

Of course we have got a kitchen already, and it has served us perfectly well. We bought it six years ago, from a very dodgy online kitchen company that would only accept cash and would not tell us their address, for two hundred quid, and apart from some of the doors being different colours, it is just fine.

It is not as nice as this one, though. This one is streamlined and beautiful, and more, will be in the right place.

We are going to have our sitting down room where the kitchen is now. If we are going to sit down and watch a film we will not mind if the room is underground and dark. Indeed, it might even be nicer, like retreating into a safe cave. We will rebuild the boot cupboard there, and it will be a room for sitting watching films on a sofa. We do not have a room like this at the moment, and I would like to have one.

We will be just like real middle class people. They do not keep their sofa in the kitchen and have to drag it out and turn it round whenever they feel like getting their television out and doing nothing for a while. They have a special place for their sofa and they have a television on the wall, not in the cupboard under the stairs. We do not often get the television out to watch films, but it is a very great deal of faffing about when we do, and it would be nice to have it all ready and prepared, so we are going to do that. 

We are not young any more. When we get older we would like to sit about watching films.

Mark went today to take the kitchen apart. He took two kitchens apart, one for us and one for Number One Daughter. They are absolutely massive, we will be awash with cupboards.

He has brought some bits home already. We can collect the rest next week.

Oliver helped me to empty the boot cupboard. We put everything into Lucy’s bedroom, so I hope she does not come back for a little while. There is always the loft bedroom, but Number Two Daughter is going to stay in that in a few weeks when she comes home.

Oliver said that if we got overcrowded with visiting daughters he would just buzz off back to school out of the way.

Mark has got to work next week, so Oliver is going to help me build a new kitchen. We are going to take down the boot cupboard and collect the kitchen and build a new one from all of the bits.

Mark says that he has every confidence in me, although I think he is expecting that it might take quite a bit longer than a week.

I don’t suppose it will be a problem. I like having a go at doing new things. I am sure that building a kitchen will be just fine.

How hard can it be?