For years I had been promised a new kitchen and had almost given up hope of ever getting it. The old kitchen was old with brown cabinets that had been painted white. Mice were frequent visitors, though there seemed to be no way they could get in. Spiders were often hunted, and cockroaches had started appearing out of nowhere. The cabinet tops always needed cleaning and it was all inconvenient for my age.
One day a man came to meet the new kitchen. Hooray, I thought, as he wrote his figures and discussed color schemes etc. he gave me about six weeks to start the work. As that moment came and went, he had actually forgotten about it.
A few months later, a doctor treated my extremely painful foot with an injection of cells taken from my own blood (stem cells). He was trying to stop the pain and sent me home with strict instructions to rest my foot for about 24 hours for the treatment to work properly.
I had barely stumbled into the house and sat down when the phone rang. It was the boy who did the cooking. It was Wednesday and he informed me that they were coming the following Friday to start work. That! I begged for more time, knowing that the entire kitchen had to be packed up.
He said they couldn’t wait because they already had the kitchen on the truck and on the way from Sydney and they would have nowhere to store it. She had to start on Friday.
From then on and for the next day and a half I ran on foot packing things into boxes, loading furniture and other things into the guest bedroom, and finally emptying the fridge and loading its contents onto an esky. By Friday it was almost a case of cot when they arrived just in time at 7:30 a.m.
They began by removing the cabinets and the sink. That’s when the big scare came. Behind the cabinets there was no wall. A large gaping hole led directly into what would have been the cavity in the wall and of course this is where the vermin were entering the house.
The large pantry that had been installed a few years earlier was to be kept and moved to the other side of the dining room where it could be used as a sewing closet. The men moved it into position, but did not fix it. Later that night, when I walked past him, he fell right on top of me. Caught between the closet and the boxes of kitchen stuff, he was trapped.
I slowly managed to grab a chair and get out, but then another quandary. Everything was closed, including the side doors and the front door. The keys were on the other side and so was the phone. Still trapped by my circumstances, I had to cautiously crawl over the heavy pantry cabinet to get to the other side.
Finally, everything was done and I look at the new kitchen. No more vermin coming in, all the holes in the wall have been patched or patched, and the new cabinets go all the way to the ceiling so the top never needs cleaning. The beautiful new kitchen is a joy to work in and the extra space it has given me is wonderful.
Despite the pain and the fact that the wardrobe fell on me, the effort was worth it. A new dishwasher and microwave was also installed and is now so good it made me a new woman.