Easter fun!

Apart from Easter egg hunts, and eating lots of chocolate, do you know what the most popular thing to do at Easter is? Yes, it’s DIY !! (sorry, but no, it’s not going to church). I did join the masses who were worshiping at the shrine of B&Q this weekend, and took the opportunity of a few days extra off work, and a now empty house, to start work on the new kitchen at my house in Driffield.

On Friday, James and I went and took out all the existing units, tiles and fittings. It does seem weird to be left with just a shell of a room. Suddenly you are able to make all sorts of changes and improvements that would have been better in the old room. As it turns out, it’s a fairly compact (ie., small) kitchen and so the layout of the new one will be fairly much the same, just replacing a few old bits for new bits!

On Saturday, James took his kids off to his parents farm for a couple of days to help with lambing, and I emptied a few boxes more at Beverley, before heading off to B&Q to get an extra cupboard.

On Sunday, with James still away and Lydia busy on her art coursework, I spent 6 hours or so at Driffield mantling (isn’t that the opposite of dis-mantling?) kitchen cupboards. Of course, all the units had come flat packed and they all needed making up, so I set about with my screwdriver, drill and alan key until I had built 6 shiny new cupboards. How satisfying (and exhausting!).

On Monday, and with James back, we were once again at Driffield to fit new cupboards to walls, etc. With lots of careful (and time-consuming) measuring and adjusting, we finally got cupboard one on the wall. Then, starting on cupboard two, there was an unwelcome spark and a thud, and yes, you’ve guessed it – James had drilled through an electric cable. Luckily it only tripped all the electric off and didn’t electrocute him, but nevertheless, it was then a very slow process to get access to the damaged cable tucked into a conduit in the back of the wall, to repair it. This took several more hours!

So, we didn’t get quite as far on as we’d hoped, and there’s still several more hours work to put in before it can be called a kitchen, but it’s good to get more done on the house. Unfortunately, we are all back at work now, and being kept more busy than we would like to be, so I’ll keep you posted about the progress of the house!