Part of the trickery of getting the new kitchen in and working has been the timing of “events”. Today one of my timing plans has come to beautiful fruition, at least in part.
The new cooker was scheduled to be delivered today. I took a gamble and knocked out the old oven/grill built-in unit and its surrounding cabinet this morning in the hope that the delivery would be fulfilled and the cooker could be connected up to the existing wiring so we’d have ovens that work by the end of the day. Basically ensuring that we have continuous use of ovens and a grill despite being otherwise in chaos.
The hob on the new cooker can’t work until we get an LPG (Liquid Petroleum Gas) line connected as we have no mains gas here in this isolated part of Cornwall. That’s scheduled for next week and in the meantime the old hob is still working, just about.
Since we moved in here, the oven has been hanging out of its cabinet by the screw threads, with the gap between cabinet and oven getting ever wider. We’d both considered that the possibility of the oven falling right out of the cabinet and onto the floor was a very real one. One day, about six weeks ago, I was cooking supper and went to pull open the oven door, fortunately with my oven gloves on, when the front glass of the door fell away from the oven into my hands. Luckily I was wearing my oven gloves because of course my reaction was to catch the glass as it fell and it was heated to 200 degrees c.
There followed a panicked session with me holding the glass in place with my oven gloves, while DM tried to see how it had come adrift and fix the problem. Eventually it was partially sorted with our best bodge job but since then I’ve not been able to open the oven door properly.
Earlier this week, when I was trying to move the dishwasher from its spot in the kitchen that was being demolished the next morning, to a new temporary resting place, I chucked a pile of old trays on top of the hob. When I emerged from under the kitchen worksurface, having spent a few minutes wrestling with the plumbing, I realised the kitchen was full of acrid smoke and I’d chucked a plastic tray onto a hob that was on!
I thought DM was going to throttle me – I’ve never seen him so angry. He grabbed the molten plastic from me and hurled it out of the front window onto the path. Now we have a navy blue plastic coating on several of the shrubs in the front garden.
Anyway, tonight’s shot is of the shiny new knobs of the shiny new cooker, which hopefully will make my life considerably easier as time moves forward. Now, where DID that dust come from??????
