Here’s my confession: I have a Monet kitchen.
I don’t mean Monet in the sense that my kitchen is pretty as a picture. I mean “Monet” in the Clueless sense, where Cher is explaining how some girls look pretty until you take a closer look:
It’s like a painting, see? From far away, it’s OK, but up close, it’s a big old mess.
That’s my kitchen.
I moved into this house about four years ago, buying from a DIY enthusiast. Friends, you should never buy a house from a DIY enthusiast.
It was two years work just to bring the DIY loft conversion up to scratch. Then there was the roof, the electrics, the bathrooms… putting in new wiring and walls meant redecorating, then the dodgy damp proofing meant redecorating AGAIN and in all of this work, the kitchen (which functions) has been shoved to the bottom of the ‘to do’ list.
It’s a DIY kitchen.
The previous owner put in the kitchen himself. Using the wrong floor adhesive meant the tiles all moved and cracked. Making his own kickboards under the kitchen units, on a shifting floor, didn’t work so well – the kickboards move, and have massive gaps between them.
Next, Mr DIY turned his attention to the worktop, and made his own wooden (WOODEN) splashback. Not being noted for its waterproofing abilities, the wood has gradually swollen and split, allowing water to seep into the counter tops which have also swollen and split. I’ve lost count of the number of t-shirts I’ve ripped because they’ve got caught on an errant bit of worktop laminate that’s peeling off the counter.
The swollen worktop means the cupboard which used to box in the boiler pipes also swelled, starting to push the boiler off the wall – so we had to ditch the cupboard entirely, and instead opted for the rustic charm of bare pipework in the kitchen. Joy…
To this charming scene, we can add home-fitted under-cupboard lighting which works approximately one day out of ten (randomly, the lights come on if you slam a cupboard door, but basically ignore the command of a light switch).
There was no door on the kitchen when we moved in, so we added one, but I haven’t quite got around to plastering above the new door frame.
So that’s my kitchen.
And I cannot express in words quite how GUTTED I am that I can’t enter the competition over on Tots100 this week to win £2,500 to make over a room in your house. Because I think £2,500 might actually be enough to undo all the Disaster DIY going on in my kitchen.
Sigh…
