Amblesides new Kitchen

We went to visit my Auntie who was having a new kitchen, we swapped stories of upheaval and workmen. She told us the kitchen she'd had for twenty five years was going in the skip but it was still good as new! My Auntie asked me if I wanted it and I realised it would fit into my little kitchen a treat, it was very exciting.

We hired a van and went back up to load it in as the workmen dismantled it. It was a big job, especially unloading it all into the house when we got back as what had been a fully functioning kitchen was now units and doors and plinths and assorted bits that took up every inch of floorspace downstairs in the house.

Worn out I went to bed with it all dumped everywhere and next day began to lug it about and organise it into some kind of order to enable me to measure it all and draw plans for my carpenter to follow. He was coming in a few days to piece the jigsaw together and I was going away for a few days break whilst he did it so it was a case of being super organised.

It was chaos and very nerve racking to walk away from it wondering if he would be able to follow my drawings and how it would look when I got back. I was so grateful to have landed a free kitchen but I knew that a badly fitting shoddy kitchen would put a buyer off faster than anything as new kitchens are normally a big expense in a new house and I'd seen enough poor DIY jobs in my time to know that this would either be a mini miracle or a major disaster. I'd had a good reference for the carpenter but I'd made a mistake years earlier when I'd paid a man advertising himself as a carpenter £2,500 to put skirting boards and dado rails into a house I was renovating and it turned out he had clearly never done any woodwork in his life. My husband was furious as it had supposed to have been a lovely surprise when he came back from a work trip, it was a disaster.
So it was a very nervous hand that I unlocked the front door and smelling the sawdust I walked alone and scared into my new kitchen...it was perfect! You just could not tell that it had come out of another house and apart from a couple of little bits of wobbly cutting, I was absolutely thrilled with it. I went off next day to buy tiles.