The corner, my nemesis

Yes another kitchen post

Taunting me

Given that World War III broke out just as our kitchen renovation ended (the nerve of Hamas, truly), I have not given that much thought to things I would have done differently on the kitchen front. All is quiet on the kitchen front. All, that is, except for The Corner.

There were some design challenges with the space, such that to have counter space as well as a usable area with a kitchen table, we needed this corner-sink set-up. Do you know what then sits above the sink, as well as behind it? A void. That’s right, a great big (OK not objectively big, but bigger than it looks in the photo) unusable void. I don’t know why this bothers me as much as it does. It just seems inefficient, incorrect.

We have eventual plans to remedy this with corner shelving (something like this, but longer), but I now sit and look at this corner and think, that’s not right. I picture it with the shelving and how the backsplash will one day not only exist but meet the shelving and how it will all come together so nicely and not look like what it is: a kitchen on which we spent exactly the amount possible on the things that couldn’t easily be changed later, such that we have the blue cabinets, fitted into the space as much as anything could be, and (crucially) the pantry toilet, and not one single ceramic tile.

I see ceramic tiles on sitcoms (we all know I mean the As Time Goes By backsplash) and think, ooh fancy, although as we have established on this blog, I can’t tell ceramic from vinyl, nor vinyl from whatever the stickers are my children keep coming home with from school/daycare. I picture what the powder room would look like if it had tile as well, maybe sort of half-tiled, and find myself in the facilities of a coffee shop or whatever, thinking, they managed to put tiles up here, is it terrible that I never even considered this as a possibility? Did you know that one square-inch ceramic tile is exactly $30 million? You do now.

Lionel Hardcastle not only inherits a manor house which he proceeds to sell back to his own father, but also marries into the above-pictured London backsplash.

If a new bioweapon is needed to defeat Hamas, might I offer my services, discussing my semi-detached Toronto home and various improvements I would make upon it if money/time/skill/sustained interest were no object? I could hold forth to them about how the kitchen restructuring means certain kitchen items now reside in the basement or the mudroom, and how eventually it would be good to replace the two IKEA (one bought secondhand and possibly knockoff IKEA) bookcases that serve as dining room storage with a big sideboard-type thing, for that overflow, and to be decorative.

Maybe they want to know about my plans for having some way of watching television in our house that does not involve putting a laptop onto an IKEA children’s table aka the coffee table, and to do something about the living room furniture having fit into the large living room of our small apartment but making no sense in the microscopic living room of our house, a shifting-around that would leave available some surface on which to mount a TV set, as I hear flat-screens are all the rage. I also have some thoughts about where wallpaper would go (by the staircase) if there were wallpaper, and which curtains would replace the presumably-IKEA off-white ones the house came with, and which part of the ceiling requires a de-texturization, and how I once looked up what that involves and it sounds complicated, it would not just mean a ladder and some sanding paper.

Do you think they want to know that we should probably at some point have our floors done, which I suppose means seeing if they’re salvageable or not, what with them being (I think) the original floors, over 100 years old and thus more splinter than floor, but elegant and I would prefer the version where they’re sanded down and polished.

Hyacinth Bucket, explaining to the Dishy Vicar why she insisted he take off his shoes before entering her house.

She normally demands this only of “tradesmen.”

Wielding only my own inner Hyacinthness, I think I could accomplish great things in this regard, causing entire terrorist groups to become comatose within minutes.