Cooking in the danger zone (and more house photos)

This evening, as I was cooking dinner, I kept banging into things.  It occurred to me, while my sandal caught on the shoe rack residing in front of the draining board, that I'm cooking in a danger zone.  Everything is temporarily in a different place to where it was before the building work started, and more and more things have found their way into the kitchen because there was nowhere else for them to go.

This is my kitchen at the moment - stove view:

That picture was taken before all the dust and a lot of the stuff migrated in. And as it is now...

Absolutely everything covered in dust and everything is in the way, including Spikey (the yucca plant), the uplighter that is our main source of light downstairs at the moment and the shoe rack that earlier tried to mate with my sandal.

Frankly, I'm just glad I can cook in this kitchen, even if it does mean moving everything out of the way and washing the dust off everything before I start cooking.  Tonight, I found myself in the crazy position of holding onto the microwave to prevent it banging against the hot cooking pot when the washing machine went into spin cycle.

Looking the other way:

Yes, everything ends up on the kitchen table, because there is nowhere else to put it.  We can't put it on the floor because the roof now has a tendency to leak in new and exciting places every time it rains.

One of the things that found it's way "into" the kitchen is a new doorway.  You may remember the original doorway was rather low. (Turned out to be at least 6 inches lower than a regular doorway.)  It was also, annoyingly off-centre when compared to the picture window on the other side of the kitchen.   When the builders stripped off the plaster, they found this:

The doorway was inserted into a much larger space, which looked like it had once been a glass door flanked by two smaller windows.  The lintel was miles up and very long.  If you look more closely, you can see an arch built above the existing doorway.

I asked the builder if he could move the doorway about a foot over to the right.  Two Mondays ago, I came home to find this:

and

The doorway had vanished.  Sorry, they're a little blurry.  (In case you're wondering, Spikey isn't sick.  He's been decapitated because he was much too top heavy and we're waiting for him to recover from the shock.   We chopped his "head" into two parts and both Baby Spike and Posh Spike are doing well, according to their recipients.)

I took those photos just before I rushed out the door to go to Site last Tuesday.  When I got back on Friday, the new doorway had been built.

And from inside the kitchen.

By this time next week, it should even have French doors on it!


- Pam