Bench Press

Don't ask about the pizza oven

We love our little Parliament House. It's just nice for us, even if it is a little bigger than we really need for just two we fill it up with visitors and art projects often enough. In the last few years we've made it our own in lots of little ways, mostly involving piling our junk up in every nook any cranny of the place. But since we've been here, it's become very apparent that more than anything else, what we're missing here is kitchen bench space. For more than a year, we kept a little dinner table in the kitchen, a very permanent temporary solution to the problem.

Last Christmas, my parents were kind enough to offer us the gift of a new kitchen bench, since we'd been talking to them about how we'd probably like to one day get around to adding an island bench to replace our temporary table. Problem solved.

Except, of course, that would require us to decide what we actually want and go out and get it. Getting things done is not exactly our best skill. It's like all our decision making ability was sapped by that decision to buy the place or something. So for the last...8 months, as far as we've got along this path of improvement is to replace our nice sturdy kitchen table with this monstrosity.

This is our coffee table stacked high with whatever books and boxes we could find at the time that happened to be approximately the right size, topped by a piece of fibreboard. This has been useful for working out what size of bench we want and for providing a conversation piece whenever bemused friends come visiting, but in it's turn it has also become moderately permanent. Permanent enough that there's a look of fear every time I ask someone to help cut the veggies for dinner, and permanent enough that on multiple occasions I've had to change the books holding it up as I needed some of the ones that were inaccessible, but not permanent enough, for example, for Mrs. Owl to bump into it in the middle of the night and not smash every piece of crockery and glassware placed on it.

So, time for a change.

We've decided we want to match it as closely to our current kitchen as we can, even though our bench tops are this strange kind of surface that always looks dirty, even when it's clean, a rare occurrence in our house. We also need at least one more drawer, since we need somewhere to put our knives, and we need some storage space for large items like our electric saucepan. We know what we want, where we want it, and what it should look like...and we've got someone else to pay. We suddenly realised that that's all the constituent parts, roll on making an actual grown-up decision for once.

The call is made, the kitchen is coming... So's christmas.

In that photo you can also see part of my project for the rest of the afternoon, someone has to do the dishes, after all.