Knocking out walls

Viola! One and a half days after the builders started work and look how much they've achieved: the entire ground floor has had all the internal walls demolished, the stairs have had a layer lifted off and the middle floor has had the old kitchen and flooring ripped out. The progress seems extraordinary as I thought a day and a half of work would mean that perhaps the water and electrics would've been switched off and that's about it. My experience with British builders has taught me not to expect a fast turnaround - in fact on our last renovation the builders would disappear for weeks at a time with no explanation. The crew on our current renovation consists of all New Zealanders. We met Teia with two of them at a local pub late on Saturday afternoon and they'd been in the UK for less than two weeks. I had to ask Teia if he was standing at Heathrow with a 'help wanted' sign, seems incredible that he's managed to find such hard working and competent tradespeople who are possibly still jetlagged. It might have taken six months to get this project underway but now that it's actually up and running I feel full of positivity… let's hope it lasts.

In other news, we went to Ikea on Friday night and bought the base units and doors of our new kitchen. Unfortunately the moulded acrylic counter top (Ikea's answer to Corian) was going to cost nearly £5,000 to manufacture and install. Our counter top budget is more like £1,500. The kitchen sales guy was a really helpful Australian chap but he said there was no such thing as a corner pull-out option so we begrudgingly purchased the wire shelving option. We have this in our current kitchen and it's not very sturdy - if the weight on one side is too much the whole thing sheers off the pole holding it upright. When we got home and inspected the brand new Ikea catalogue (which I'd gotten from work a few days before it hit the public) we noticed that a brand new kitchen feature is the... pull-out shelving option for corner units. So in what will be the first of many visits to Ikea we'll have to return the wire shelves and order up the replacements…