Kitchen complete! Sanity lost!

It’s taken four weeks, a lot of cursing and the last remaining shreds of my sanity, but at last – at long, freaking last – we have a fully functional, shiny new kitchen. You know, like normal people.

Photographing a really small kitchen = much harder than you’d think, which is why you get two pictures featuring more or less the same view. I promise we DID do the other half, too, it’s just that I couldn’t really get a decent picture of it without hovering somewhere near the ceiling. I did take a video of it too, but I’m going to take a wild guess that my kitchen isn’t of so much interest to you that you’d want to watch it in glorious Technicolour, even although it has consumed Terry’s every waking thought for the past four weeks. Mad props to Terry, by the way, for his kitchen fitting skillz, and to my dad, for giving up his Sunday to cut worktops: always a good way to spend a weekend, I find. (I went shopping while this went on, of course. So I can take no credit AT ALL for anything that’s happened in the house this month, but I DO have a really nice new coat.)

As well as the kitchen, we also have shiny new floors throughout the house, and will be moving into the garden shed now, so we can keep them that way FOREVER. It’s the only way, really. I mean, last night, for instance, after the final boards had gone down and I was lovingly cleaning the new kitchen, I happened to glance out of the window to see this:

Clearly someone had been digging in our long plant pot thingy (which, actually, I have no idea why we even have that, or what’s in it. That’s the old flooring beside it by the way. We don’t just have random bits of rubbish in our garden. Well, not ALL the time, anyway). Now, I knew the culprit couldn’t be far away, and sure enough:

Rubin then proceeded to walk around the shiny new kitchen, placing his dirty paws on the shiny new doors, and wiping his dirty face on… everything. And why had he been eating the dirt in the plant pot thingy? Because Terry put FISH OIL in it. It’s testament to how stupid trusting I am that I have no idea why he did this, despite questioning him about it twice now:

CONVERSATION 1:

AMBER: Terry, Rubin seems to be eating dirt from the plant pot. WHY?

TERRY: Oh, that’ll be because I poured fish oil into it.

AMBER: Okay!

CONVERSATION 2:

AMBER: Terry, Rubin’s still eating dirt from that plant pot. Why did you say you poured fish oil into it again?

TERRY: Well, it was better than pouring it down the sink.

AMBER: Oh! Okay!

And this is why no plant or flower we’ve owned has ever lived for more than a few weeks. And why Rubin’s been smelling of fish oil for the past few days, now I come to think of it.

Anyway, the house is now complete. And I promise that this is the last post you will have to read about my house decorating woes for … oh, how about forever? Because that sounds good to me round about now…