You Be Fred, And I'll Be Ginger!

This is one of our family phrases being said a lot at Cornerstones lately. Specifically when two people have to pick up a heavy item and carry it together through the home, or outside to the garden or workshop. It all goes back to this wonderful 1982 carton by Bob Thaves. Ms Rogers was a very gifted woman!

Health And Safety Notice #1 I must stress that neither I nor Bob wear high heels when moving heavy stuff, we always don appropriate footwear for the task! But one of us will often have to go backwards as we carry a cupboard out onto the patio, and it is helpful to decide that before you pick something up.

Dismantling the cupboards has not proved too difficult. Many units are going to be repurposed - one length of worktop is going to make a new bench for my garden workshop [ie the old garage] at a height which I can reach. Other units are to be rebuilt at the end of the coach-house for storing 'car' stuff. Some will becoming shelving in the loft. There is very little going to the tip! We are recycling as much as we can. Much is currently under a tarp, looking like a little house.

Bob reminded me of four years ago, when we had a 'dragon' on the patio, storing the leftover wood from the Lathe Palace construction

Stripping out a kitchen reveals so much. The walls were initially magnolia, then salmon pink, then magnolia again, then we added a blue feature wall. This will be the third set of cupboards in 50 years, and the many holes and rawlplugs bear witness to previous fittings. And why are the pitifully few electric sockets all different styles and at different heights? [and apparently fitted without the use of spirit levels!] I thought the contorted plumbing under the sink was bad enough - the stuff behind the cupboards is like some sort of copper and plastic macramé work. 
Before anything new goes in, there will be much "making good" of the walls, and tidying up of pipes and cables [and installing good quality matching power sockets]

Things are mostly relocated to the back bedroom - no chance of granddaughter sleepovers for a while! A friend asked if we were living on 'sandwiches in the lounge' for the duration. I was able to reassure her we were managing to eat 'proper' meals, using the Futility Room Mini-Kitchen.[more on that later] And Adrian and Marion kindly invited us for Sunday lunch, which was absolutely splendid.
I am very conscious that if we were using a firm of Kitchen Fitters, they might have taken one look at what has been revealed in the stripping out, and declared that there's Lots More To Be Done than originally envisaged, and extra £££s would have been added to labour costs.
Health And Safety Notice #2 We are paying due care and attention to energy levels. Regular breaks for a sit down and a cuppa. Bob sits on the Dalek when working low down, better for his back than bending. Heavy loads are either divided into two smaller ones, or we work together to shift things. And we have a calendar charting the days when we have other commitments, so we are not working too many hours.
Fortunately we are able to laugh at ourselves, and have fun as we work, which makes the task so much easier.