Hmm, one day it will look like one large kitchen.

Finally, 8 years on and we have a new kitchen on the way. I have tried wrecking the other one to move things on a bit but it back fired slightly. Instead, I have spent the last two years looking at a few gashes in the current kitchen cupboard doors and wished that I had not been quite so heavy handed (or footed as in one case).

Each child was given strict instructions to use all force with any indoor bike or fire engine to make scrapes and bruises but alas the kitchen was rather well made and didn’t succumb to their bad driving.  But now its days are numbered.  But rather than have a new kitchen, which was never really  justified, we have instead decided to move it to a completely different place in the house altogether, thus improving our ‘quality of life’ in the process.  If someone had just told me that this would have happened, then I would not have had to put up with a couple of broken cupboard doors for all this time.

The current kitchen is simply too dark, is at the front of the house and miles way (literally) from the garden (which of course we haven’t finished yet).  This fact alone made life awkward when the boys were very small but now it is of lesser importance as when they fall off the climbing fame it’s not quite as far too fall; now that they are older they simply bounce.  So it’s not an issue to keep watch over them all of the time.

The room we are moving into is an old slaughterhouse (makes for good conversation at dinner parties) and attached to an old double stable which is currently called the living room.  We don’t use the living room at all which is a great shame; it was never the right shape and simply didn’t work, no matter how many times I moved the furniture around.  Instead it is a glorified corridor out to the cowshed/slaughterhouse/whatever, at the back of the house which we have used as offices for the last five years.

So here we are. Granddad arrives on Monday to knock a wall down and we must clear the two rooms over the weekend. Always ones to leave everything to the last minute, not because we are poor planners, but because we each have our own businesses to run in the meantime. So this weekend we shall be secreting children and animals to family and friends all over the village until the boxes are packed. Otherwise we may lose the cat in a box and a child to the recycling. Or the other way around.

We will be kitting out both rooms as one large project, turning the adjoining living room’ into a day room, with a huge table and little else.  We put a large log burner in there last year and took the rest of the year to recover from the cost of it all, but it made sense as up until then, all the heat from the real fire simply went up the chimney.

I have this ideal that in time I could be at one end of the table baking a cake, and the children could be at the other doing their homework.  I live in a lovely little world.

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