At last. AT LAST. The kitchen is nearly done. I say nearly because it should have all been done and it isn’t, because nothing ever goes to plan.

I knew that something was going to go wrong with installing the worktops on Sunday, but it was too late to rearrange Stephen the stonemason who has been crafting a pile of old snooker tables into smooth shiny worktops.

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I had to arrange the kitchen around the maximum size of a piece of snooker table slate, which took a bit of changing things around with the original plan. But I thought slate would be nice – the house being near Ballachullish and all, and I nearly died when I saw how much a proper slate worktop costs. So I went to my local salvage yard, did a deal on five bits of snooker-table and then set about finding someone who could make them into worktops.

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While I phoned round every stone mason in Glasgow, my worktops sat in the salvage yard, waiting to be fetched. 

After most had said no, I spoke to Steven who said he hadn’t worked in slate before but he thought he’d quite like the challenge of something new. (Or at least that’s what I assumed he’d said as I had a bit of trouble understanding him, despite my long long apprenticeship in Glaswegian, and despite two daughters who regularly tell me I can’t pronounce the letter “R” and try and get me to speak like them)

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In fact, in the end, I had to arrange to go and meet him somewhere in town one lunchtime so I could speak to him face to face to make sure we were understanding each other. He said he was down at the Spiritualist church quite often (which rather freaked me out), but in the interests of the slate worktops I arranged to meet him there and, to my great relief, found him up some scaffolding pointing at bits of sandstone and covered in stone dust.

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So Stephen said he’d pick up the snooker tables and do the necessary. I checked with the salvage yard a few weeks later. They were still there. And a few weeks after that.

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Eventually, at the moment I was about to despair, he fetched them to his yard where I met him again with some sketches (this time he showed up in a shiny suit and pointy shoes and a 90s shiny, pointy car, all of which rather surprised me)

From then on I would contact him from time to time to tell him things had been pushed back. And he was always intensely relaxed about all the date shuffling and uncertainty (which at least is something to be grateful for). 

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But this time I didn’t call to push the worktops back again, although perhaps I should have done when I found out that there was a problem with the kitchen.

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Cue another aside about the kitchen …. Tom, who made the kitchen, is a good friend from University, who after a high-flying degree and a stint trying not to climb the greasy pole in London, decided to retrain as a cabinet maker and move to a wet, isolated and be-forested part of Stirlingshire to make kitchens and furniture in a shed.

He has built me an absolutely beautiful kitchen. I gave him the sizes things needed to be and chose the colours (‘can I have some of it red like that barn outside?’) but he decided on most other things, which cut down the number of decisions I needed to make. (Though I think I suggested the bookcase on the end and the tall-slidey door).

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He incorporated a sink that has been sitting in my front garden since I found it abandoned on the street about ten years ago. Over that period it has been a pond, at request of husband, and then, once declared a wildlife deathtrap, it became an algae-growing garden ‘ornament’. When I visited the house to see progress on the kitchen it still had the algae and the distinct smell of pond water.

I also wanted Tom to incorporate an ex-lab bench I fished out of a skip at the university and took home in a black cab when I was doing my PhD about 16 years ago. This lab-bench became an enormous coffee table when we sawed the legs off it to get it into the cab and has taken up most of the room in two sitting rooms since then. It wouldn’t be for the whole kitchen – the rest is slate. However since it would cost the same to have an oak worktop on that bit instead, due to the labour needed, I went with that. The lab-bench will be my dining room table (once we stick some bits of wood on again to lengthen the legs).

So the kitchen is beautiful, and I did so love it when I saw it. But it’s in all skew. One wall is warped and goes in in the middle. I probably did a blog about that ruddy wall which caused me so much grief to get in in the first place….

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However fortunately that run has the stove in the middle of it and so the units on each side tilt inwards (but parallel with the wall) and Stephen simply left the worktops a little long and cut them on the angle alongside the stove sides.

The more serious problem was that Tom put the kitchen on the other side on an angle all the way along and not parallel with the wall. This is what I found out the day before the worktops were due to arrive. It was all due to a socket being right behind the fridge which, when the plug was in, pushed the fridge outwards which meant that the whole run of units came outwards. But, since a drawer had to come out and run past the handles on a unit at right angles, he put the whole kitchen on a tilt so that it would work.

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This meant it was simply impossible to fit the worktops, they overhung by a completely different amount on each side of the kitchen and also from one end to the other of the units on one side.

We decided we needed to get the whole kitchen moved and so Stephen and his team left for the long drive back to Glasgow.

 The first woman working on the house!  

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It’s now getting rather close to Christmas (which we are going to spend at the house even if it involves eating sandwiches off a piece of plywood propped up on boxes). So the plan is the electrcian comes in this week to finish off, Tom comes to move kitchen on Tuesday and Stephen returns to finish with the worktops. The only thing outstanding then will be the tap for the kitchen sink which I seem to have lost.

 Don’t they look lovely? Snooker tables do scrub up well – especially when you have little inclusions of fools gold in them. Hoping they’ll be less liable to scratching once they are treated.