S. Worthen | Weblog

[Poll #1286000]

And the obvious, but accidentally omitted possibility: You know what shelf liner is, but choose not to bother with it.

I went to a decent kitchen shop today today to buy shelf liner, but they said they'd never stocked it, in all their years of operation. Am I looking in the wrong kind of shop? Am I looking in the wrong country? I've never installed it myself, but it's been a staple of most decent, owned-by-user, long-term kitchens (and often bathroom cabinets and drawers) I've experienced in my life.

Today, for the first time, we did a load of laundry in the house. We not only have a washing machine, but it's wired and plumbed in and it works! For the first time in months, we no longer need to go to the laundromat to do laundry.

That's the major kitchen update this week: we now have a functional washing machine, dish washer, and oven. It's very exciting. Having a usable oven adds immeasurably to our diet's variety. We've picked the color for our cabinets - Woodland Pearl 4. The extractor fan should be wired and ducted in this coming week. Within the next two weeks-or-so, we will have a worktop. If all goes according to plan, the kitchen will be done by mid-November.

How lovely it is to have functional indoor plumbing with running water!

Yesterday was the third and final cabinet installation day. We not only have cabinets, complete with handles, but also, all the appliances are in place (although mostly still not wired or plumbed in). The important thing is that we have running hot-and-cold water available at a functional kitchen sink, complete with drainage that slopes downwards slightly as it leaves the building. No more uphill water drainage for the sink! Hurray!

Alas, with no working washing machine, we will be making one last (I hope) trip to the laundromat this weekend.

It looks like a kitchen! The right cabinet arrived today, as did the last appliance. With a minor exception, all the cabinets are in their place. So are the appliances. Today was like Christmas, opening all the boxes. The plumbing and wiring hasn't happened yet, though.

Our kitchen now has a sink, washing machine, dishwasher, oven, and warming drawer. Which one is the only one that's currently usable? ( Inevitably.... )

It's as if someone took a blank piece of paper and pencil and sketched in a kitchen. The space is defined in gestures, precise lines and details here, rough indications there.

7:55 am - The cabinet delivery guys arrived early, with lots of cabinets and spare parts.
9:15 am - The fitter arrives. We have already figured out that one of the cabinets is too large and not exactly what we ordered. It will not fit. We call the cabinet people. The replacement cabinet will come on Tuesday. This complicates things.
10:00 am - The fitter wonders if the contractor will (later) redo the plumbing. They obviously have different ideas of where pipes should go with respect to cabinets.
2 pm - I gain newfound respect for a local pub. The fitter has ordered his lunch from them and came back to wait 10 minutes until it was ready and he needed to go back to fetch it. The doorbell rings. The pub has - unsolicited - brought him his lunch. Talk about service!
5:30 pm - The sink is installed (but not plumbed in) and all the cabinets that can be are in place. Nothing else can realistically be done until the wrong cabinet is replaced. We were told handles wouldn't be needed until the last day; ours arrive on Monday so he can't even install some of those while waiting for the cabinet to show. The fitter gets a three day weekend, and we get a day's delay to our kitchen.
7:00 pm - It's challenging doing dishes in the bathroom sink. I can fit in two mugs at once at most.

I've decided that we don't need to buy any living room furniture. We can construct it all out of our growing collection of enormous cardboard appliance boxes. Then I can paint it all in bright, cheery colors.

If you haven't already guessed what color Peppermint Beach is (and haven't already looked it up), do that first. The post to respond to is here.

( Peppermint Beach... )

Today marks the day - I think - of having the least kitchen. The holes for the washing machine drainage and the exhaust hood were punched throught the wall today, and except for the sink, everything else is already cleared out. As soon as the contractor's tools are cleared, the kitchen will be even emptier, but those don't count as kitchen to begin with.

Speaking of the exhaust hood, I just received a phone call from the company from which we ordered it, asking how the delivery went. I'd love to know myself. Their customer service was pre-emptive. It may yet arrive this afternoon. The dishwasher, on the other hand, really did arrive, the first appliance not-destined-to-be-used-until-kitchen-installation to do so (although the kitchen sink arrived last week).

The kitchen is now painted, at least one coat of it, white ceiling, Jasmine White walls, and - in a somewhat necessarily hasty decision - a Peppermint Beach door. I'll post photos of it tomorrow. It's very - vivid; which I wasn't expecting, based on the swatch.

Greetings from the land of moderately-ridiculous paint names!

Without cheating and looking it up, guess: exactly what color is "Peppermint Beach"?

(C. thinks you should all provide RGB codes for it. I'm more forgiving and will settle for words.)

C. came home from a work trip abroad on Thursday night, three days into kitchen work. It was all rather changed since he last saw it.

It's even more changed today. The kitchen is down to a sink, a scrap of countertop held up by a few planks of wood (literally; not parts of cabinets), and some piping. The gas and water guy was here today, a cheerful young man with a native accent from somewhere in SE England that was nearly incomprehensible to me. Whatever he did, without even telling him it was a problem, it fixed the pressure in the boiler and our ability to have hot water in the kitchen sink without the water on at full blast.

Temporarily, the kitchen is beautifully spacious with so little in it.