Okay so I haven’t spent the last 130 days working on the kitchen. I got to the point in October where I had a working kitchen and lost my motivation. So what’s been happening since then? Well obviously a lot more than just the kitchen but let’s get that out of the way for now.
I made a New Year’s resolution to get the kitchen finished. Allowing 365 days to finish off the details on a project where the vast bulk of the work had been completed was a resolution that I felt I could probably keep.
There is a bit of background that needs to be added at this point:
1. I had discovered towards the end of 2008 that I was spending at least £400 a month more than I had been earning and this had been going on for most of the year. Financial doom loomed large in my life. Why must I always be so crap with money?
2. The good ship Nortel had been carrying on with a similar financial strategy as me but on a much grander scale. The Captain at the bridge was now sailing full speed towards the siren call of the Mermaids of Bankruptcy. The share price had dropped from a historical high of $140 to a mere five cents and the thought of actually being made redundant early in 2009 was fast becoming a reality. Why must Nortel always be so crap with money?
These two facts added up to me facing the fact that I might have to sell the house for whatever the market value might have slipped to by the end of 2008, which, if you listen to Robert Peston, was likely to be about £50 and a handful of Air Miles to sweeten the deal. Now I don’t spend a lot of time watching property programmes on the telly, even if they star Sarah Beeny, but even I know that selling a house with a half finished kitchen is a lot harder than selling a house with a complete kitchen.
So with all of this preying on my mind I got busy on 3rd January with the under-cupboard lights. Half a dozen halogen bulbs in holders – how hard can that be eh? The short answer is; two days, a dozen Stanley blades, a cricked neck, mashed hammered thumb and a whole lot of swear words that even I never knew that I knew. It was as though fate had decided to punish me for my end of year procrastinations.
That experience was not enough to put me off the whole DIY thing so on the 8th of January I was “working from home” when on impulse I decided to open up the tub of tile glue and stick some above the hob. I did quite well and got all of 20 tiles on the wall. None of these tiles needed cutting so it was quite easy. I made a cheeky measurement from the worktop, drew a straight line, nailed a plank and just built what I could without cutting any tiles. Piece of cake, except my measurement was out and the bottom row of tiles would need cutting all the way along the long wall and they only just fitted between the cupboards under the extractor. Oh bugger!
Cue another period of procrastination...
It was a relatively short period of procrastination this time. It may have lasted longer if the Captain of the Good Ship Nortel hadn’t steered us straight on to the rocks. Good work Cap’n! He’s obviously worth every cent of the $1,200,000 plus benefits he will earn this year! Nortel went into Chapter 11 in the US and Canada and administration in the UK on 14th January. It was a nervous time as a contractor, really working day to day, not knowing if Pitney Bowes would pull us out of Nortel at any time. Redundancy had really come knocking on the door and selling the house was a real possibility.
I got the tile cutter out and made progress to the left of the hob all the way along the long wall, cursing that I didn’t have the foresight to position the plug sockets in line with the bottom of a row of tiles. It was an okay job, far from perfect, but I made it all the way around the window wall to complete that side of the job.
The weekend I chose the temperature was hovering just about freezing outside and the tile cutter has a water-cooled circular blade that sprays cold water in a straight line from sternum to groin. By the end of both days let’s just say it was almost cold enough to freeze the balls off of this brass monkey! It’s amazing what you can endure when you are working in a blind panic!
Following that freezing weekend I vowed not to get the tile cutter out again until temperatures were a little more “genital friendly”, but then of course, it snowed. If the rest of the country was going to come to a halt then there was no way I was going to go out there and cut tiles.
In the meantime I was forced to put the plinths on the bottom of the cupboards and board in the gap down the side of the dishwasher after finding out that one of the cats had been using under cupboards as a handy litter tray. The smell was not good and cleaning it up was both unpleasant and really awkward so once it was clean I couldn’t risk it happening again.
Finally the time came this week and I got the motivation to get going again. This week I have got the tiles all on the walls. To be honest it’s not a good job. A lot of the tiles are not even, not in terribly straight lines and not all spaced correctly. Sod it though; they are all on the walls now so it is too late to go back.
So that takes us to right now. All tiles are on and grouting has been done on about half of them. I have no plans for this weekend except to finish the fiddly bits like sanding down and filling the counter joins, the quadrant at the back of the counters, finish the grouting, re-grout the bad bits on the floor and seal it all up where the counters and cupboards meet the tiles.
This is my intention for the weekend unless any social invitations come my way – there’s a possibility of a pantomime and after-show party on Sunday. After all you don’t have to do DIY at weekends when you can work from home during the week!
