Episode 5. The Road to Enlightenment

A whole new blog in itself!

Hello fans. I’m sure that by now, you’ve realised that we’re currently having the kitchen replaced. I don’t want to get too literary and high-falutin’ with my words, but this being Spain, the path to enlightenment and a shiny new work surface has been littered with the used condoms of frustration. The Constitution here says that nothing should be easy and true to their word, Spaniards follow this rule avidly. It’s just a shame that the same can’t be said for waiting at traffic lights, where it seems that anything goes; particularly if they’re on a red light, but that’s a whole new blog by itself.

Doors, similar to the one we've bought,
only we bought just one and there
are only 3 panes of glass in ours.........
and they're a different wood.

 I’ll share an example with you. We’re moving the door round from one wall to another and replacing the hinged variety with an unhinged one......no sniggers please. I’m still talking about a door, a sliding one to be precise. It will give us more space and will also cost us an arm and a leg; there’s nothing more that José and I like to do than choose the most expensive option when a perfectly good cheap alternative is available. Anyway, had we chosen to install a sliding door in the UK, a carpenter would have come, tutted, said it wouldn’t be easy, but would have then shown us the designs he could do for us; at a price. Would we like glass or plain wood? What wood would we like? Do you slide to the left or the right sir? He would have then gone away, bought the thing, made it and then fitted it. Do they do that here? Not on your Noelia!! Here, we went to the door shop and chose the one we wanted. We wanted one with some glass panels, but they don’t do that. They only do doors. It’s a door shop; not a door with glass panels shop. Only doors! So, we ordered the door and then we waited. In fact, we ordered the door three weeks ago and having been told it would be done “mañana” (or thereabouts), we’ve only just taken delivery of it. We then had to take out the panel frame where the glass will go, in order to have glass cut to the exact shape and size. The emphasis is on the ‘we go’. There’s no-one doing it for us. We have to schlep around and find a Cristaleria, choose the glass and have it cut. We then have to bring it back here for a carpenter to fit in the door, just before he fits the actual door in the new hole that’s been made for him by the builder. Having one person to chase up for the door is not easy, but imagine having to chase three of the buggers?

Those heels were murder!

There’s another concept so beloved of the Spaniards and that is to tell you what you will have and what is best for you. It doesn’t work so well when clothes shopping. I swiftly realised that when I went to school in a tweed two piece jacket & skirt ensemble with 3 inch kitten heels, which apparently didn’t suit me as well as the assistant said it would. Spaniards love to ask you what you would like and then tell you it wouldn’t look good. Continuing the theme above, let’s talk glass; glass for sliding doors to be precise. We went to the Cristaleria where a very pleasant but rather tiny little fat man told us we could have any glass we wanted in the space we had. We choose a rather nice plain opaque one, not going in for fancy patterns, only to have him suck his breath in. Mind you, given that he was a tiny little fat man, sucking his breath in meant he was now wider than he was tall, which was something I couldn’t take my eyes off. If you ever get the chance to see it, just ask me for the address of the Cristaleria and pop in. It’s worth the petrol! Anyway, I knew what was coming. It was a case of, “.......(once more sucking in his breath into his fat little lungs) that glass is very expensive and very difficult to get hold of...........I think you’d be better with this one” before pointing at another plain opaque one which we also liked, but not as much as the other one. We went with his choice. I’ve learned here that the path of least resistance is the path one should always travel, especially when one don’t speak the bleedin’ lingo. The lesson here is that you can have any type of glass as long as it’s the one we recommend. Take this lesson and apply it to anything here in Spain and you’ll be fine.

The little fat man wasn’t the first person to tell us what to buy. We’ve had all sorts of choices made for us since we’ve been here, so that’s why choosing the kitchen tiles was such a joy and a massive shock to the system. Yolanda is the most wonderful woman in Spain. Official! Yolanda serves us in the tile shop and she lets us wander around to our hearts content, fingering her tiles, moving her sliding panels all over the place and generally getting in the way. Once we’ve decided what we want, it’s all perfect. Yes you can have that. Yes it will look fabulous. No, there’s no problem at all. I think I love her. In fact, if I could, I would shop at Azulejos Rojas every day, just for the experience of not hearing someone suck a lungful of air in before telling us that blue would be nice and yes we could have those blue tiles, but yellow is this year’s blue and in fact those blue ones would look bloody awful!

The ruin that was once our kitchen

.............and so the kitchen moves on. It’s been just over a week since I wrote the above words and things are falling into place. The plumbers told us that the washing machine and dishwasher would be fine where we wanted them, but that we should swap them round as it would be better and in fact, they were going to do that. That wouldn’t be a problem, would it? The electrician told us that we could manage with the fusebox we had, but a new one would be better as things could blow at any moment, so it would be better to put a new one in. That would be okay, wouldn’t it? And the man who came to fit the false ceiling told me he liked the trousers I was wearing, but wouldn’t I be better wearing shorts in this warm weather and that I should go and change them immediately. All in all, a regular week here in Spain.

Boobies, but not my mothers. Both
of these are still attached
to their owner.

I won’t miss the old kitchen at all. There were things all over the place and the layout was terrible, so it meant we had no nice long run of units to work on. The one thing that all of the workmen have agreed on is that moving the kitchen door was the right thing to do as was changing the doors to the lavadero. This is the name for the little washroom that is off the kitchen (I told you before, this is more than a blog, so make notes, as there will be a test just before Christmas).  The old lavadero is now going to be a small storage space with a fridge freezer and a tall slim unit for veggies and other such fripperies. Prior to the changes, it was used as a lavadero and so there was always washing hanging and not just normal washing; mainly underwear. Many’s the time I’ve had a faceful of my mother-in-law’s gusset when trying to get to the back shelves to retrieve some potatoes for peeling or when splaying a chicken. José says that this is revenge for him handling my mother’s bosom when he was at home in Lincoln one time. I guess if nothing else requires an explanation in this blog, that particular statement does..........after a mastectomy some years ago, my mother has quite an impressive array of falsies. One day, we were searching through the bedroom drawers for something mum had mislaid when José opened a box to see if it was in there. Before I could warn him, my mother’s booby plopped lifelessly into his palm. Now, try and imagine you’ve just walked naked into a freezing cold shower. Picture your face now. That’s how he looked at that moment. Sometimes I still hear him murmuring in his sleep.

As I write this, we’re now three weeks into the kitchen changes and the work is almost complete. I say almost. The tiles are on, the floor is down, all the electrics are where they should be, we’ve a new fusebox, the boiler & the door have been moved, a false ceiling has been put in to hide all the tubes and pipes and so on and it looks lovely. We’re just missing one small thing.............kitchen units! The units can’t come until Monday as the builder won’t be finished until Friday afternoon. Yes, it has taken a long time and this is because the tiling goes in first. In the UK, most people tile around their kitchen units, but not here. Rather like my mother-in-law’s doilies, in the kitchen, if it doesn’t move, it gets tiled. Now, I hear you crying out in your millions, ‘why?’ you ask, ‘why have you had to pay out good money for tiles to be put where the sun don’t shine!?!?!’ I asked the same question. The answer was – suck in a large lungful of air – ‘well you could just tile the bits that people could see, but what if you want to move the kitchen around in the future? I could just tile those bits, but it won’t be right. In fact, you need to tile everywhere just in case. I’m just going to tile everywhere. Okay?’ And so, everywhere has been tiled and another expensive lesson in the way things are done over here has been learned.