Kitchen Demolition

What happened, you may ask, as I did, sobbing in a corner.

A new kitchen was always one of our priorities and while Luis was hesitant – he felt we weren’t quite ready for the undertaking - I went in head first asking local DIY people to remove the old kitchen while we were back in London. There would be no turning back, always the best way to move forward I find.

It had been a dusty job, apparently, and I arrived to find the groundfloor kitchen bombed-out and the rest of the house covered in a layer of dirt, despite our friends’ best effort to do damage control. Looking around me, wondering how the hell we were ever going to get a new kitchen, let alone afford it, was the sobbing moment.

The old, traditional-style kitchen units (actually from the ‘80s and pretty horrid) had come down, and with them the green mosaic tile work top, the huge fake plaster chimney above the hob and the strange little corner shelves for glass displays. Yuk.


The whole thing went on for close to three weeks and it seems I was somehow always working during that time, in the mornings before the helpers came, in the evenings after they’d gone home – and thinking about it all night, hyperventilating and unable to sleep from stress. Boxes and suitcases with kitchenware and foodstuffs took up most of the floorspace in the bathroom (tucking your tummy in to get to the loo is no way to live!) and sittingroom, with me effectively banned to the top floor of the house and the bedroom, though these areas were also used for temporary storage. My diet was bread and cheese though good neighbour Sally kindly asked me round a couple times for real meals …

It’s all behind us now, thank God, and I’ve more or less forgotten the endless travails, set-backs and minor run-ins with the DIY people as we were scrambling our way to some form of result. What we have now is a fantastic open, (relatively, for a cave) light space, with beautiful white plasterboard walls (cleverly put up with an exhaust system behind them to prevent humidity building up) in one half, an enormously long black laquer worktop built on white plinths, with just one set of drawers and a cupboard at one end. The rest is shelves, a traditional country kitchen with a contemporary twist. The other half of the room has been re-rendered with a limestone concoction, leaving the stones on one wall exposed, while Sally and I made a new floor of ragréage – some form of cement mix.

In short, the house has been transformed and you can imagine the deep joy I felt when Luis, who had been slaving away at the BBC, walked through the door and said: "I love it!"