English Rose Kitchen

The Larder They Come

I’ll be honest here, my reasons for starting this blog were 100% mercenary. It was only later that I discovered writing about stuff not exactly kitchen renovation related was more fun.

I knew that when we’d finished the kitchen we’d have a load of English Rose Kitchen units left over and now that we’ve worked out what we’re using there’s a whole bunch of stuff that we’re going to sell on.

I’ll itemise and photograph them properly later, but at the moment if anyone’s interested in a rather nice ERK larder (about 5′6″ tall) and a wall unit in great condition, both still with the original paintwork (which means they could do with freshening up), let me know. You can’t have the larder yet cos we’re using it to store bits and pieces during the renovation, but this is a heads up!

We also have a few doors, draws, odds and sods. More later. Oh – and we can tell you where to get them repainted too.

Last view of the old kitchen with disassembled bits of the new kitchen in the foreground

I realised that if we didn’t let our contractor C. get going things would continue to drift. Weekend after weekend we’d find new excuses as to why searching for ovens, sinks, shower heads and the like could wait until the next weekend. Finally on Tuesday I gave the go ahead and he and a mate came in to rip out the kitchen.

When I moved into this place just over ten years ago the thing I first fell in love with was the kitchen, but imperceptably over the years and with no apparent intervention from anyone it’s become a fixer-upper, complete with wildlife and a variety of frankly non kitchen-like odours seaping in from heaven knows where. By Tuesday evening we had no kitchen, but some idea of where the smells and wildlife came from.

Not that I haven’t lived in worse places as a student …

I’d always imagined that it would be quite a traumatic experience, but as it happened we were so behind in the taking-STUFF-to-storage project that I was literally emptying out the kitchen units as they were prising them off the walls, so I didn’t have time to think about it. In the photo it doesn’t look so bad, but in real life it looks like he result of one of those “precision” strikes you get shown video of whenever some invasion or other is being justified. It was, however, rather traumatic for our cat Smirkle, not least because we had to move her food and water bowls into the bathroom.

Nice in Paris, but has no place in a house

On Wednesday they came back and ripped out the shower/steam room. That was definitely not an emotive experience because it had been falling apart for about 5 years and reeked of rotting wood. The steamer itself was a great idea, but had been mounted on the wall with its array of pipes and cables in a manner that was apparently cool when the Pompidou Centre in Paris was built, but has no place in a home.

During the process they had to lift part of the floor to get to the stopcock and turn the water off for a few minutes. It was a couple of hours before we noticed that Smirkle was missing and we weren’t really sure where she was until we heard wild mewing noises from under our feet. You’ll be relieved to hear that I lifted the floor again and Smirkle lept out.

Reds attempts to show Geordie John what he’s made of

Well last Monday came. And last Monday went. As did C. He took one look, said “You guys aren’t nearly ready”, explained that we’d better pull our socks up by this Monday “or else” and left.

So this Monday it will have to be and the flat is currently full of not just STUFF, but the boxes into which it must go. It’s daunting. The sheer weight of STUFF that we need to shift tomorrow. Or else!

John shows how “In my day we used to make our own entertainment”

Completing the impression of an indoor urban wasteland, today we¹ fetched nearly all our English Rose Kichen units back from my parents’ garage. Those with long memories (or a mouse with which to click on the following link) will recall that the units have been enjoying my parents’ unwitting hospitality since they were away on a cruise back in May.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that the kitchen units in their current form look like something that Mutoid Waste Company would enjoy using as raw material, but we took the necessary leap of faith around 9 months ago that we could make this work. Oh yes – aside from putting the remainder of our worldly goods into storage tomorrow, I’m also charged with reassembling the bizarre metal puzzle that is to be our new kitchen by matching all the bits against the few complete units that we have.

Just how crap can we made the kitchen look?

In the meantime I just ate what’s probably my last meal from our current kitchen because it’s the first thing that’s going to be ripped out on Monday. It’s sad because we’ve had many wonderful social occasions based around the kitchen, but the sadness is tempered somewhat by the fact that for at least two years it’s been virtually unusable, partly because the stove now only has two working rings and a well known singer/songwriter friend drunkenly kicked in the oven door one night (quite seriously unintentionally!) and partly because of the STUFF accumulation that’s taken place.

To add to the confusion, our shower/steam room is being ripped out and what’s currently our living room is being transformed into the kitchen. We will spend the next few weeks with no kitchen, living room or shower room. Wish us luck.

¹In the interest of giving credit where due, I enlisted the help of my good friend and Rotten Hill Gang assistant Geordie John and his (t)rusty van. In a surprise move he brought along Reds (from RHG) to help. The two of them did stirling work and refused my offer of a curry or similar in return. I think I’ll still make them have one though.

How we looked at the fancy dress competition according to my memory

When my sister and I were kids we used to get entered into a lot of fancy dress competitions, which we would almost always win due to the ingenuity of our dad. Dad had a simple rule. If you can’t make it good, make it big. The winning outfit that springs to mind at the moment was when we went dressed as the Yellow Submarine ^{1 and 2}.

Invariably the foundation of the outfit would be a selection of cardboard boxes (and in this instance a lot of yellow crepe paper), which we would collect from our friendly-local-corner-shop³. I was reminded of this today when I realised that I needed to put a whole load of afore mentioned STUFF into storage this weekend because – now I hope you’re sitting down for this, the renovation starts on Monday!

You see last weekend Dave’s friend Corrado, who’s going to be effectively project managing the renovation paid us a surprise visit. Except that we were the only ones who were surprised, because evidently we’d arranged a start date of last Monday. Oops! I guess the intervening Christmas cheer was a little more cheerful than I remember.

Frankly we needed the kick up the old wazoolee and this Monday he’s coming round with an electrician to start ripping things up and installing new lighting and – well – whatever else it is that electricians need to do when you’re moving your kitchen from one room to the next.

Remembering those halcyon days of winning fancy dress competitions and not being willing to part with another £25 to our storage company, I popped round to our friendly-local-corner-shop and picked up a selection of cardboard boxes for free. I’m just about to pop up to the storage to press them into action …

¹I hate to sound like a Monty Python sketch here, but we really did have a lot of fun with some cardboard and some gaily coloured paper. Granted you’d be hard pressed to make an Xbox out of it, but we didn’t know about them then so as far as we were concerned this was as much fun as you could have.

²Purely to embarrass him, I thought I’d mention here that my brother, at that stage still learning to speak, used to sing “We all live in a yellow sumbarine”. He also used to enjoy something called “Bread and ha-ha” with his breakfast.

³In the UK a “corner shop” is roughly equivalent to a convenience store in the US. They’re almost always friendly and they’re definitely shops, but the striking feature is that they’re called corner shops whether or not they’re actually on a corner.