A red letter day!

image from Clipart Portal

For the whole time we've lived here we have cooked using a mini oven and two-ring electric hob.  We had built-in appliances at our old house so didn't have anything to bring with us.  Before we moved, we decided to get the mini oven as a stop-gap to tide us over until we'd decided what to do with the kitchen.  As it turned out, the flippin thing can only be used as either an oven or the top plate, not both together *sigh*  Hence the need for the separate hob.  I have hated using both appliances and Adrian has done the bulk of the cooking since we moved as I found it just so frustrating!  The oven temperature is not all that reliable and the hob takes forever to heat up!  

But today was indeed a red letter day...  

as our new cooker was delivered and wired-in 😃  Who knew it would be so exciting to get a new cooker LOL  I'm so looking forward to getting back into cooking, and baking, too ~ and this year we'll be having a proper Christmas dinner complete with homemade Christmas puddings, which I'm sure will please Beverly no end 😉 Shug very kindly came out yesterday to cut a gap in the worktop and he has finished it off so nicely too.

We also had to replace our old fridge/freezer shortly before we went down south as it was on it's last legs and I don't think it really liked the journey up here to be honest.  Mind you, it had done pretty well ~ we calculated that it was well over 20 years old!  We looked at various fridge/freezer options but in the end we decided to buy separate ones, which has given us a lot more storage space and also means that I will be able to do bulk cooking.

With all the little issues that have come to light since we started work on St Abbs, it's going to be quite some time before we can have anything major done in the kitchen.  As you can see from the photos above the kitchen has been wallpapered (I can hear you all asking why anyone would put up paper in a kitchen; trust me, I've asked myself that a fair few times as well LOL) and it's pretty grubby-looking.  When we had the electrics done to accommodate the new cooker, Ray told us that the wall where the cooker is (and, I suspect, two of the other walls also) has had hardboard fixed over wooden cladding ~ probably the original cladding.  On the opposite side of the kitchen, horizontal cladding has been fixed over the original vertical cladding!  So much easier, surely, to simply paint the original cladding ~ and so much easier to keep clean too!

Anyhoo, we've decided that we will strip the wallpaper and hopefully whatever is beneath will be okay enough to slap some emulsion on LOL  I'm not too sure when we will be getting round to doing it but I'll be sure to take plenty of photos as the work progresses.....she says, keeping her fingers crossed that she remembers to actually do so 😉