The Confounded Conniving Kitchen

When we first moved into our house the kitchen was, let us say, idiosyncratic. I managed to find an old picture from the estate agents brochure and it looks quite nice with its breakfast bar but, in truth, it was horribly laid out. The breakfast bar was largely unusable and the ergonomics of the rest of the kitchen were appalling , what with the refrigerator stuck out in the utility room along with the dishwasher and (inexplicably) the microwave oven. We cut back the breakfast bar and moved the appliances in which did make things slightly better and we did have the previous owners to thank for leaving the dishwasher and gas cooker, both of which have been providing solid service until recently.

The kitchen - sans fridge, dishwasher and microwave.

The utility room - with all the kitchen stuff but no dryer .

My tale of woe started around three weeks ago when I was trying to grill some burgers in the cooker. The burgers ended up well cooked – flame grilled, in fact, as the dripping fat caught fire sending flames pouring out of the back of the cooker. My initial thought with this was that the cooker needed a thorough cleaning and set about attacking it with some oven cleaner (an effective but dreadful spray that could probably double up as a chemical weapon). It was only when putting the cooker back together that the real problem came to light as the glass on the cooker door fell out. A replacement cooker was in order.

My first thought was to get something like-for-like and I trouped down to Currys to find something. It turns out that stand-alone gas cookers are not exactly cheap and when including the installation charge they can easily go upward of £600. I thought I’d try to scale back a bit and read up about cooker standards to see what I actually needed. Having had a quick look through the fitting guides the one thing I discovered is that our existing cooker was not fitted correctly as it was hard up against the adjacent cupboards. I looked at the next size down (55cm width) and, to my surprise, these were even more expensive. I don’t even like gas – at least the gas ovens with their caveman friendly “gas mark” numbers in leiu of an appropriate temperature setting.

This is where my ideas started to run away with me. There is already a 45A fused electric connection behind the cooker and it is perfectly possible to buy a separate electric oven and hob for under £200 and then fit them to a simple kitchen carcass (around £25). Of course I would need a new worktop but I was pretty much sold on this idea and ordered a not exactly basic hob and oven from Currys / eBay. All well and good until the confounded dishwasher decided to choke itself to death in protest. “Oh well”, I thought, “I’ll use the Fairy bottle.” Well I did. Once. I then determined that this was too much of a faff and ordered a new dishwasher. The one I wanted was also fitted so I am also getting a new carcass and worktop for this as well.

To cap it all, I cleaned the cooker hood extractor fan in preparation for the new hob. Needless to say the bastard thing fell apart and is now supported by a paper-clip. Essentially, what I needed was a new kitchen. I had a quick look at the handy pricing guide on one of the kitchen fitter’s websites and swiftly decided that I could not afford the “bargain” £7,500 they were offering for a new kitchen. As ever, I will make do and mend. Unfortunately, I have outspent my income in 7 of the last 8 months so it is a case of quite how little I can spend without making a total hash of it – and also without ending up with the microwave next to the washing machine.