The Big Reveal

Well, it is finally here – the new kitchen is finished (more or less). We had a bit of a setback when the tiler rang to postpone his visit. You have to give it to him though – his customer care couldn’t be faulted. He actually rang me from his hospital bed, after he had been admitted as an emergency, to say he wouldn’t be coming. The poor man – the last thing we wanted was him to be worrying about our kitchen until he was well.

Anyway, he turned up last week, still recovering but able to work and I think it was a relief to him to find that our kitchen was smaller than he had feared, so he could take his time over it. He has done a fab job, as I am sure you will agree.

It wasn’t our only hiccup of course. You may remember our beautiful light fitting from previous posts. We took the delicate shades down while we painted and the tiling was done and then we set to work at the weekend to put the finishing touches to the room, including putting the shades back up. Sadly, although we did our best, there was a sudden lethal crunching noise and one of the shades was broken. Crisis! We are trying to track down a replacement but, in the meantime, we have a bare bulb.

Finally, we decided to give it some yellow accents to brighten the whole scheme. Have you ever tried to buy yellow things in October? It seems it is a spring colour – everything in the shops at the moment is purple. So much for being on trend! I did manage to find a hand towel and a beautiful chrysanthemum pot plant but sadly, I didn’t have a nice yellow pot to put it in. “We’ll pop out and get one,” D suggested. “It won’t take long”. After 2 hours of trawling round home shops and garden centres, we had to admit defeat. Apparently, pot plants are also a spring affair – the shops don’t stock them in the Autumn, they are too busy setting up Christmas displays. (Christmas? Nooooo … )

It does mean we have the pleasure of collecting items as and when we find them though, and we are looking forward to some exciting new finds over then next few months. D has already found a rather lovely bowl and I have all sorts of ideas for blinds or pelmets for the windows.

The cats are totally unimpressed, of course, although the Calamity Cat is desperate to explore the kidney-shaped pull out magic corner cupboard. It has nothing to do with the fact that the cat food is in there, of course …

So, here’s a reminder of what our kitchen used to look like:

And finally – drum roll please – our sparkly new kitchen that we love:

So, what do you think? Let me know in the comments!