A year on and we had decided to start deconstructing our kitchen. Or maybe I should say, the kitchen has started to self destruct. We’ll just say, it didn’t take much to start taking it apart and leave it there! However, this has started a wider conversation of what do we want out of a kitchen. The wrestle between the aesthetically pleasing and the practical went back and forth. I went to a kitchen planner and designed a kitchen. An aesthetic one. Practically the same kitchen i designed 10 years ago in our previous house. I wandered around the diy shop like a millionaire choosing worktops, sinks and handles. Once it was all calculated, including fitting, I inwardly gasped and went home to ‘think it over’. Yet it was also something else. Things have changed. I’ve changed. Our family has changed. Out location and vision has changed. So shortly after my kitchen planning visit; when I was told I’d need an indoor oil boiler as part of this kitchen, (the current one is being dripped on in the dilapidated shed outside), it didn’t quite fit. Plans were scrapped. If I was to have an oil boiler in the kitchen, there was no question, it must be functional in more than one way. A rayburn oil boiler? So now we were now forced into the practical and away from the aesthetic. In for a penny, in for a pound…if this was the direction we were going down, all the visions of a wood fired Rayburn returned…fast! An oil boiler was good but in a power cut, useless, as the electric pump would stop pumping oil. After many phone calls, deliberations, prayers and tears, we came to a decision and managed to find a solid fuel Rayburn. We collected it in my van and then let it sit in there for two weeks whilst we worked out how we would get it out of the van. Two weeks of prayer and knocking on farmers doors, the Rayburn was taken out of the van and into a safe holding place waiting for us to work out how it’ll be fitted…alongside an oil rayburn.
Did I also mention, we also now have a very lively destructive dog?
People sometimes ask, why do I like to make life hard for myself?
I sometimes wonder about this too…