No, not Afghanistan - the Shoebox kitchen
Eleven years or so ago I extended the back of my London house and renewed the kitchen. It involved a miserable life for a number of weeks, cooking on a camping stove and washing-up in a bathroom basin. Then we moved to France, and the building works were so radical that we moved out for eight months. Now - plus ça change etc. - we find ourselves back in chaos again, with the replacement of the kitchen in the Hastings Shoebox.
When I bought the house I knew that the kitchen was the weak point. We'd originally wanted to knock through the chimney breast into the dining-room at the front of the lower ground floor, making an open living and dining area: but there was no hope of getting that past the listed building authorities and in any event it would have meant removing the whole chimney breast, which, we soon realised, probably kept the house up.
We hadn't reckoned with the kitchen layout being illegal, however. A small range cooker had been placed in the chimney breast, too close to the walls and in particular too close to two electric power points. So, never ones to do things by halves, we had to go the whole hog and rip it all out. Again, however, we had not reckoned with the need to dry-line the walls with lath and plaster - yes, gentle reader, these ancient buildings have to be treated with respect - involving a period of five or six weeks for the three coats of lime plaster to dry out, one after the other.
As if this weren't enough, most of the other rooms in the house also need some dry-lining work. Aargh!
The silver lining in this cloud was the news from Paul's tenants in the Matchbox next door that they would be moving out at the end of October. So we shall be able to transfer through there for a couple of months. The fly in that ointment is that some work is needed on the Matchbox windows, so we may be peering through scaffolding in our more comfortable quarters. Roll on 2013...
Antony Mair
Living like squatters in the dining-room
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