Oh boy

"I fell."

My 20-month-old says this about 70 times per day, and he's always right.

***


"I fell." My 20-month-old says this about 70 times per day, and he's always right."I fell." My 20-month-old says this about 70 times per day, and he's always right.

Oh look!

You know I was complaining I had no photos that showed the really sad "before" state of our kitchen when we moved in? Well, I found them!

Before Part 1 (and please appreciate the true awfulness of the suspended microwave):


After:


Before Part 2 (featuring a tiny Berry in flight):


And after:


Yay!

...and After!!

At last, the new kitchen!!!! New granite benchtops, super-deep under-counter sink, travertine wall tiles, removal of ugly wallpaper, paint in latte tones, spiffy pull-out Moen tap (faucet, Americans), Bosch cooktop and oven. I haven't even figured out the 800-odd features of the last two, but I gather it's something along the lines of: if I leave them unattended I might come home to find they've baked me a layer cake and set the table for dinner.

A little reminder of what it looked like before:

That's the old stove where 9 meant hot, 6 meant tepid and 1 meant nuclear. And that code varied between hotplates, just to add to the sense of cooking "adventure". I don't miss it at all.

And here are more after pictures {if you click on the images, they'll show up larger}:

The kitchen already had custom-built hardwood cabinets, so we left them completely alone. But everything else – brand spanking.

Here's the view from my sunny office through to the kitchen:

And here's a gratuitous close-up of my favourite tea towels in the whole world – "Borrowed Spoons" from the super-talented Heather of Skinny laMinx:

After almost two months of kitchen chaos, I am one happy, happy girl...

The kitchen: before, and progress

I wish I had a "proper" before shot of our kitchen, because it didn't look like this when we moved in two years ago.

Where the brushed stainless range hood is, lived a breathtakingly hideous and huge black microwave oven (yes, suspended above the stove and incorporating a range hood... of sorts...)

We tossed it the first month we lived here, along with the sad old black dishwasher, which made upsetting noises. So in fact, the "before" picture above is much better than what we saw when we moved in.

We've been moaning about the wretched wallpaper in our kitchen ever since we bought the house. Textured cream with marbled beige and gold through it. Ew.

What we didn't realise was that there was worse underneath. Behold....

And we had no idea there was even worse under that! Gasp:

We (and our neighbours Tom and Deonne, bless them) spent forever removing three awful and poorly-applied layers of wallpaper, only to discover that the villains who whacked up the very first layer hadn't bothered to use liner paper underneath. So.... hours and hours more, just to render the walls paintable.

Here are a couple of the contractors working on the kitchen:

Here's one of the stages that made me think, Oh my...

Below, Tom and Nathan sanding back the wreckage on the walls. Sanding, sanding, sanding...

Little Man-show, who became obsessed with letting us know what needed to be vacuumed...

Below, another stage where I thought, Oh my... (although you can see the top of the lovely new Bosch oven, beneath the tiler's chaos!)

The beginning of the tiles going up:

Some more of the tile, early stages, and a glimpse of the granite benchtops under a fair bit of debris:

And that's where I'm leaving it for now! Because I don't have an after photo yet, even though there is an After.

In a day or two, I promise...!