We Are Changing Everything* (*Our Kitchen)

Happy Easter, everyone*!

(*Or those who celebrate it/have some time off, anyway.)

So, I wasn’t actually going to bother posting anything today, because it’s Easter Sunday, and I’m sure you all have much better things to do with your time than read my blog, when you could be eating chocolate eggs (Which is probably what I’LL be doing by the time you read this, funnily enough…), but then I realised that would mean leaving you all in suspense about the state of my oddly swollen eyelid, so let the record show that my eyelid is, indeed, back to normal:

Of course, by “normal” I’m obviously referring to the new “normal” in which my eyelashes are but stubby little shadows of their former selves (Thanks for all of your advice on that, by the way: I’ll let you know how I get on!), but hey – I can wear mascara again, so that’s the main thing, isn’t it?

Anyway, with that little update out of the way, the exciting news from this week (And by “exciting news,” I mean, “only to me and Terry,”- and, actually, I don’t think Terry’s all that excited, really, given that it’s going to be a whole lot of work for him…) is that WE HAVE ORDERED A NEW KITCHEN! OMG!

Yes, folks, after almost four years of patiently explaining to people that, no, I don’t think I actually WILL ever come to love our dark, gloomy kitchen, with its odd, “country farmhouse” style floor (Which would be totally fine, by the way, if we actually lived in, you know, a country farmhouse. Or if whoever laid that floor hadn’t smeared cement all over the top of it, thus ensuring that it would ALWAYS look dirty, even when it was squeaky clean.), we have finally – FINALLY – taken the first steps in replacing both it, and the flooring in the adjoining living room and hall. It’s… going to be a big job. A REALLY big job. Probably even bigger than that one time we decided to fit a new radiator in the bathroom of our old house, and it took five years, plus every last shred of my sanity. GOD.

Replacing the kitchen itself is probably going to be the easiest part of all of this, in that we’re not changing the layout, just the cabinets. This, in itself, however, is still going to be hella awkward, because it turns out our kitchen cabinets are a non-standard size, so we have to get the upper cabinets from one company (If you’re thinking it’s going to be IKEA, then I’m guessing you’ve been reading this blog for a while now, huh?), and the bottom cabinets (Or new doors for them, anyway: we’ll be keeping the actual cabinets…) from somewhere else. Oh, and because the bottom cabinets are ALSO a non-standard size, they’ll all have to be pulled out a few inches, in order to accommodate the new integrated appliances I decided I just couldn’t live without, thus casually adding another few hundred £££ onto the already-scary price-tag. We’re spending a lot of time repeating the words, “It’ll be totally worth it, though!” right now, needless to say.

That’s the easy bit, though.

The hard bit, meanwhile, is going to be replacing the kitchen floor, which first of all means taking up the existing kitchen floor… which is tile, cemented straight onto concrete. (No, we can’t just put the new flooring over it without having to raise the living room and hall floors, and replace all of the doors, including the two exterior ones…) Yeah. When we first bought this house, we actually had a tiler come round and give us a quote on doing that, and his main piece of advice was, “Don’t even think about it.” He then quoted us a price which would’ve allowed us to buy TWO new kitchens* (*No it wouldn’t. It was a lot, though.), which is why we’re going to be doing this ourselves, as you might have seen on my Instagram stories this week:

Yeah, I lasted approximately 2 minutes before declaring that this was BORING and I was DONE, and hey, Ima go upstairs now, where it’s nice and clean and tidy, and there are no hammers and… other things. But at least I tried.

(Also, this is actually the most accurate photo I’ve managed to take of the kitchen floor. For some reason it always comes out looking much better in photos, but not this time, so, see how totally filthy it looks? That’s not actually dirt – no, seriously, I promise it’s not dirt! – it’s just the way the floor always looks, thanks to the spectacularly bad tiling job. I normally get a bit sentimental when we’re changing something in the house, even if it’s something I really WANT to change, but I hate this floor so much I got quite a kick out of smashing it up, even although it wasn’t nearly as easy or as satisfying as I thought it would be. Like, it turns out tiles are REALLY hard to remove (WHO KNEW?), whereas I thought it would be a bit like peeling off your Shellac polish, when you can’t be bothered soaking it off. Er, not that I would EVER do that, obviously. Ahem.)

MAN BREAK THINGS.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that we should hopefully end up with a pretty cool kitchen AND downstairs flooring that doesn’t have to be cleaned every time I look at it. (You think I’m exaggerating about that. I only wish that were true.), but we will have to endure a whole world of pain to get to that point. In fact, by the time we take up the existing floor, replace it with a new one (er, FIND a new floor to replace it with…), and do all of the kitchen stuff, we’re probably looking at at least a couple of months of absolute chaos. AT LEAST. I mean, the last time we replaced a kitchen (Because, no, this is not our first rodeo, kids. WHY DO WE DO THIS TO OURSELVES?), it was:

a) A much smaller kitchen

and

b) A much less complicated job

…and it STILL took at least two months, if memory serves.

Terry has informed me that this project is going to be AT LEAST 100X worse, so… does anyone have a spare bedroom I could borrow for the next few weeks? I promise to keep it really, really clean and tidy? Anyone?

So, that’s what’s been occupying our minds this week. Just to make sure things drag on for as long as possible, the first half of the new kitchen will be delivered this coming Thursday, and the second half won’t be arriving until a week later. Oh, and we haven’t even PICKED the flooring yet: we’ve been shopping for it, and we have some samples on the way as I write this, but we haven’t actually found something that we’re 100% happy with yet, so… it would probably have been a good idea to do that BEFORE deciding to rip the existing one up, huh?

Wow, that was a LOT of words about floors, wasn’t it? And to think that when I started this post, I’d actually intended it to be a roundup of the entire week, not just a slightly disturbing insight into the amount of time I spend thinking about flooring right now! Still, it’s probably just as well that you know what you’re in for, because from here on out, I’m willing to bet that this kitchen reno will figure prominently in my diary posts, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’m sure it’ll all be worth it in the end, though. I mean, it will… right?