Our House Renovations - Kitchen

 

However well equipped one's kitchen is it is no good if something goes wrong!   Now I am very lucky to have a wonderfully equipped kitchen which we are enjoying. We have the luxury of a dishwasher which is maybe an extravagance for the two of us certainly, but when we entertain or have guests staying with us it really comes into its own.

So imagine how frustrating it is when only days before our daughter and her boyfriend arrived that the dishwasher decided to play up! This dishwasher has actually had a mind of its own since day one, as soon after it was installed the door panel fell off, it still worked luckily, just took many weeks to get it repaired, it was also rather annoying having it spoiling the look of the kitchen we were so thrilled with.  This time it seems more serious, an electrical fault rather than cosmetic as every time we switch it on, it puts our power off!  Yes, yes I know we only have 3KW of power and this often happens if you overload the system, but this is something we have learnt how to control. Never try and run the dishwasher when you are cooking, washing or ironing and so on. This happens with nothing else in use every single time you switch it on, so definitely a fault within the dishwasher.

The problem now is trying to get an engineer to come and deal with the situation. It is still under guarantee as it is around a year since the kitchen was installed and it is a five year guarantee. We discovered this fault on Friday(16th) and we spent ages on Saturday morning on the phone, a normal working day here, the engineers phone just rings and rings, it is never answered, you can imagine how we feel about this.  We had the same result on Monday afternoon. a lot of shops and businesses are closed Monday am, then again yesterday morning! By yesterday afternoon we had, not surprisingly had enough and a trip to the supplier of our kitchen was required. It turned out someone had given us the wrong phone number when we originally contacted them about our problem!!  You can imagine how we reacted to this, so this time they phoned the engineer on the spot for us and laid it on about the urgency as we have 'gli ospiti' guests arriving. We now have to wait for the engineer to phone us to arrange an appointment. We have been assured that we will have had a visit by the end of the week which will cost us a 25 Euro call out charge as the appliance is over six months old. There is a five year guarantee on the dishwasher but apparently we still have to pay this initial charge.

Anyway I needed to get this aggravation off my chest so decided to tell you about the kitchen renovations at the same time. At least at this time of year it is easy enough to do the washing up as we will be at the beach for picnics, if not at home eating salads for lunch and in the evenings we will BBQ or eat out.

Now for some photographs.

                                                                         As it was on viewing, this room now classified on the house plans as the kitchen was originally an annexe/store room. On the left hand side of the photograph there is a small bathroom, we have removed this and the walls to incorporate the area into the new kitchen. I will explain in more detail about the layout of the house when we purchased it and how we have changed it another time.

                                                                                                         View along house, from annexe, now kitchen, this area is already looking rather different but not finished yet.

All the renovation work has been done by our very good friend Nick along with my husband David. They have made an excellent team and have both worked extremely hard to turn this house into a lovely home for us. I really do appreciate all the work they have done although they know that sometimes I did get frustrated with the inevitable mess and dust they created.  One of there first tasks was to raise the door height from the annexe into the main house as seen here.

By May of last year the kitchen was being installed and we were able to move from our camp kitchen in another room to the real thing, with so much space.

In October the Stufa/Wood Burring Stove was installed so we were ready for the winter, I wrote a post with photos  about that at the time which you can read by clicking the link. Stufa Installation

Finally this is the finished room.

We are extremely happy with the results of our kitchen renovation and agree with our daughters that it is probably the nicest kitchen we have ever had! It is large light and airy, with three aspects. Two large windows face west and south, while to the east are double patio doors out onto our outdoor living area.

I will in due course write more about the renovation project doing before and after posts.  After almost a year and half we are just about finished with the internal works, which were fairly extensive as when we arrived there was not even an internal staircase! 

If you are interested in seeing more of the works in progress now rather than wait for my before and after posts, there are lots of photos you can look at in My Flickr Albums. Renovations

This afternoon just before I was about to post this the phone rang and would you believe it was a lady phoning on behalf of the dishwasher engineer to make an appointment. Rather she told me that he will be coming and if she understood the directions I gave her the engineer should be here between 8.30am and 9am tomorrow morning. I will of course let you know the outcome.