And then at the weekend - The Kitchen

After an enjoyable week at work there was the weekend.

The Old Kitchen

Our new kitchen seemed to be progressing almost (almost) by magic. I was still at home when the base of the kitchen went in but a few days later I was back at work and I came home to a new marble counter top.

Because I didn’t want to restrict myself, or chose a colour scheme that would quickly feel old, both the cupboards and the marble are pale, creamy colours. They look lovely but I decided for the ceramic backsplash something more colourful was in order.

Naturally because I was looking for a bottle blue, to contrast with the yellow paint I had planned for the walls, beige is now all the rage. And although previously a Provence-style oval-shaped tile had caught my eye but now the pattern seemed a little dull and grey.

Eyal found a lovely yellow tile but the blue in the series which I had seen earlier was now sold out!

Finally while rummaging in the end of line corner (with the rather apathetic saleswoman wearing an expression that said ‘why can’t they take the first thing I show them. I am never going to get rid of them!’) I found a mock-collage tile strip which matched the yellow perfectly. They only had a limited amount of tiles left but because of our two large kitchen windows they were plenty.

The tiles were gorgeous but I was a little nervous about how they would look on the wall. We had some tiles put up in England when I was a child and the man had made a disappointing hash of it.

Our electrician guy promised he had found an expert tile-man but I was anxious all day until in the afternoon my mother phoned up to ask excitedly when I would be home to see my ‘lovely’ new tiles. And lovely they were.

The New Tiles

In between tiles and marble our electrician was paying us regular visits to make serious improvements to our wiring. First we upgraded then he added sockets for the major appliances. Our electrician knows I like to have plenty of choice about where to plug in so he also doubled all the above counter sockets!

And this was the stage we had got to at the weekend. We just needed the rest of the kitchen and another visit from the electrician for the kitchen to be finished.

Oh and before that happened we needed to paint!

When I was a teenager my parents’ kitchen dining room was a bright sunny yellow. Not only did the colour amplify any natural light, making food preparing much easier and more enjoyable, it also brightened up even the greyest morning helping to wake me when I was half-dead.

We had planned to use a similar yellow for our new kitchen but as the ceramic tile was quite bright we decided a paler yellow might be more suitable.

In fact, the pale yellow we had used for the sitting room and the hall turned out to be perfect and we had had some left over which saved us a trip to the shops. There was not a lot of wall to paint and on the sections that would be covered by cupboards we only made a half-hearted effort but there was a lot of delicate painting around the windows and along the edges of the tiles.

Eyal had to get out the poly-filler to repair the damage caused by removing the previous kitchen and Odelia squeezed in to paint the wall beside the fridge. We got it done quickly, though it was quite tiring leaning over at awkward angles, and were very pleased with the result.

Our Yellow Kitchen

Then we spent the rest of the weekend gazing at the boxes of kitchen utensils piled in the sitting-room and dreaming of the next week when ,hopefully, they would be gone.