The before's, durings and afters 2: The kitchen

The original kitchen with doorway

I thought I could kill two birds with one stone here and show the before's, during's and afters of the wood burner too, but there's so much has happened to bring the kitchen from the three rooms that were, to the one room that is.

It's been a long time coming, but finally, just a little while ago, we finished the kitchen - well, as far as we can for the time being anyway.

When we first got to the house, the kitchen as we now know it, was actually three rooms: a kitchen, a small salon and an entrance vestibule. None of them worked that way for us. We had always dreamed of the 'great room'; that huge expanse of space where we could spread out and just be.

Dark, narrow and very old-fashioned

All the houses we have lived in have had small rooms. Ironic when you think about it as England has some of the biggest people, yet as a general rule of thumb, has houses with some of the most miserly spaces to live in.

Plywood and Formica everywhere -
well-built but had definitely seen better days

Take our last house. It had three bedrooms, yet had a kitchen that was no more that three metres in length - or about ten feet and was less than two metres wide (about six feet or so). I could put my arms out and touch both side walls and if one of us was doing something in it, the other had to stay out. Even the cat was wary of being in there if either of us was. This is what laughingly passes for a family home.

Scary isn't it?

From the kitchen down through the
entrance vestibule

 Our first thought here, was to bash the walls down and open the whole area up, but the closer we looked, the more scary a prospect it became. I'd guess, it wasn't until about our third visit that we actually bit the bullet and began removing the walls. Not a job for the feint of heart, I can tell you.

The original salon

 It's quite a prospect taking walls down in your house. There are structural considerations to be made, but after we had been assured that the walls were not supporting ones, down they came.

As you can see, the pictures give ample reason to want to rip the downstairs to pieces, I mean, we wanted space, not 'spaces' and whilst the demolition wasn't easy and would mean we would have a room downstairs that until we moved in permanently, would feel like a building site, the job had to be done.

It took umpteen trips to the dechetterie with bag after bag of broken bricks, plaster and sundry rubble, but soon we had what we had always wanted - space.

So here we have the beginnings of our great room.

With the walls removed - requiring no small amount of blood, sweat and tears on our part - the amount of space was something bigger than we had on the entire ground floor of our rented house in Blandford.

We've never had anything that big.


We had room to move about, room to put our stuff; stuff that had been in boxes since we left the house before Blandford - about three and a half years in real money.

I spent days and days before we moved here, using Blender to create an accurate 3D representation of our ground floor complete with cupboards, tables, chairs - everything including the kitchen sink!

Once the visualisation was complete, we had the ideas we needed to put the kitchen back together. Of course, so much of what we were hoping to achieve was dependent upon how much money we would have to do it with, and the further into the renovations we got, the more it was looking like it was going to cost us far more than we budgeted.

... and we didn't have bottomless pockets ...

With the addition of our wood burning stove, we're really pleased with the results of our labours. Pen made new curtains for the windows and with the walls and ceiling painted, it's really come to life.

We have elected to leave the floors as they were as being commercial grade tiles, they're more hard-wearing than anything we can afford for the moment, and saves us the bother of trimming the doors.

Exposing the beams was, we feel, an absolute necessity. They add so much character to the room, which at present is a little bland. We haven't had the time to find things to go on the walls other than the pebble clock that I made and the 'Keep calm and carry on' tea-towel that Pen framed, to work as accents.

We had initially planned to keep the original wooden cupboard unit that used to be under the window in the kitchen, but when we pulled it out so that the plumbing could be done, we discovered that it was in foul condition. It had been built when everything everywhere was Formica on ply.

Sadly, on all but the top, the Formica had peeled off, leaving behind the glue that had once held it in place. Had we tried to remove it, it would have been costly and extremely time consuming. Besides, where it hadn't been moved for probably several decades, there was all manner of crud everywhere, making it unhygienic, or to use today's vernacular - minging.

So, as you can see, the old crap that used to be there has now been replaced by new stuff - at far greater expense than we had anticipated, but in the end, it's far more fitting than anything I could have built.

I did have to assemble all the cabinets and drawers, but essentially, the kitchen furniture - worktops, cabinets and drawer units - all came from Brico Depot, coming in at about 20% the price we had seen locally and is far better quality than similar units in England.


It maybe the only room that can be classed as finished, but it's made such a difference.

Next room is the new bathroom...

Amber's first visit to the vet

With a new cat in toe, our responsibilities have gone up quite noticeably. Not only do we have the decorating and finishing off in the house - which might not get finished until long after we're drawing pension - but now we have this tiny little life that right now, is totally reliant upon us

... for everything.

She's no bother though and eats very little, so that's good, but she has to see doctors - or a vet in her case. After the fiasco with the bath, I just knew she wasn't going to like this.

As luck would have it, she didn't mind the journey at all. She was surprisingly easy to get into her cat box, probably because she wasn't big enough to go star-shaped and stop me from putting her in it. Nevertheless, unlike Sammo, who made noises like someone was trying to strangle him all the way from home to the vets, Amber was very quiet.

Better still, she was quiet when the vet - a very nice woman, who had been recommended by the lady that told us about the cat in the first place - poked, prodded and generally woman-handled her before dropping the bombshell.

Now anyone who has read my stories, will know that I have written one or two stories of a transgender nature; mainly those that involve an unexpected change either by magic or accidental. I suppose it would therefore be fitting to be told that Amber was not what we thought she was.

She was - or is a boy.

To further add to our confusion, she wasn't three months old either, but more like two - as denoted by the fact her eyes - sorry, his eyes were still violet-blue.

So Amber was not an Amber after all and try as we might, we were not able to associate our little bundle of fluff with a name that to us, was definitely feminine.

To begin with, Pen didn't think it mattered, as once he got to seven to eight months old, he would be neutered anyway, making him if anything, A-sexual.

"I don't care," I grumbled. "It's a girly name and he's a boy - apparently."

"Says the man whose name in French sounds just like Nicola?"

"Yes and I don't like that anymore than he's going to like being called Amber. It's a girl's name."

The upshot was, we decided a name that was more appropriate for a boy cat was in order - regardless of the fact that he would only continue to be male for the next six months or thereabouts and we began considering alternatives to Amber as a name.

He was not precisely ginger, and we began tossing other names into the mix like Oatmeal, Butterscotch and other gender non-specific names, but nothing really stuck. At least, not until I began calling him Biscuit Brain. Somewhat derisive I know, but it was because of his clumsiness and his propensity for doing completely daft things, having us in stitches; laughing like drains.

To cut a long story short, Biscuit has stuck - though I don't always drop 'Brain'. Not only does it kind of fit, but he's actually responding to it and in the month we have had him, he's doubled in size and daftness.

True, he's lost a lot of that clumsiness that he, like all kittens seem to have and replaced it with sheer lunacy, enjoying nothing more than racing and tear-arsing around the kitchen, arms and legs akimbo, whilst dragging his favourite toy - a bit of gardening twine with a bit of paper tied to one end - around in his mouth.

Yup, he's going to continue to be a handful. He's learning how to jump with height and distance increasing on an almost daily basis and as he has settled in with us, his confidence and curiosity have also increased, meaning that there are fewer places in the house that he won't go nosing around.

He's certainly keeping us on our toes, but makes up for it by being extremely cute and cuddly, which has made a really nice change, since our previous cat, Sammo, was such an ornery bugger.

With the cold weather upon us, we spend many a pleasant evening relaxing in front of the wood burner, watching one of our favourite shows on the TV, whilst polishing the cat.

See; I told you he was cute ...