When Ally McBeal married Indiana Jones, I thought: now there’s a woman will never lack for a kitchen cupboard. Before his widely publicised and emulated skill of hat wearing, the groom used to be a carpenter; the ability to put two pieces of wood together and make them stay that way is arguably more alpha male than the knack of looking fetching in a titfer.
In the absence of the hob, a thing actually at a factory near us, waiting to be collected but lacking paperwork for five and a half weeks and the last wall cupboard, a thing in existence in a warehouse an hour and fifteen minutes away, long since paid for but awaiting delivery to a DIY store, my husband has been carpentering.
The builder having skilfully adapted the rain-soaked cabinets of the previous kitchen faithfully to follow the sloping floor and I having redesigned a U shaped kitchen with two inaccessible corners and a tall oven housing to an L shape, we have an over sufficiency of doors. This is a good thing because it allows, for the man who can wield a saw and his woman a brush, the adaptation of a normal kitchen into the twenty-first century geriatric kitchen. As the world’s population of vociferous baby boomers booms ‘Get us a coffee, love’ and the now generation, now back with their parents snarls, ‘Get it yourself, I’m texting,’ it becomes more important to have a kitchen adapted to the needs of the geriatric. If you can hobble downstairs and make your own cup of tea, you can sling the offspring back into the real estate market and bin the ‘Golden Acres’ ads for a bit longer.
To which end my husband has been making pill drawers.
Now how brilliant is that as an invention? Once you get to a certain age your day begins with an interesting selection of designer drugs, over-the-counter potions and herbal bet-hedging compounds. It’s no good ignoring it. It crept up on us in the last kitchen until the entire counter-top was littered with assorted plastic boxes full of pills and paper bags waiting to replenish the boxes when there was room. Now we are extremely mature, there is nothing of interest in our drawers so I thought we could keep medication there.
My other half swapped two days of his life for pill drawers and the swearing was much more consistent with Indiana Jones tackling a soldier with a big sword, or a runaway mine truck or a person-size stone bagatelle ball than a man with a saw, some ready planed timber and some dainty glass drawer handles. It would have been easier if the narrow cabinet he was fitting them into had had 90 degree corners but, of course, the floor sloped that way and then that way. It would have been easier if he could have got inside instead of just his arm inside but they were pill drawers, smallness was of the essence of the drawer. It would have been easier if he hadn’t tried to make the four fronts line up the grooves in the wood from the cupboard door they had been, to match the thin bin cupboard door he made to go beside them. It would have been considerably less exacting had he been a carpenter by training and not a scientist. But it did and he couldn’t and he wanted to and he was. So he did.
Finishing has now taken place and he has filled two drawers with his pills with the greatest of ease and must now get back to the workouts, and not need further medication because I’m bagging the bottom drawer for the spices. After Miniatura I’ll refinish the spice rack which is like a little dresser. I bought it over thirty four years ago with a ten pound note received as an an engagement present, long before I fell into the miniature world, just because it was a cute little one. I do use it, but, as with any cook, the experimental stuff of the moment is in unmatching jars and packets, which will no longer sit on the counter top in plastic mushroom baskets.
All I need now is the hob, the heater, and the floor and another tub of expensive grout. The 40 odd quid a throw grout is terrifying, you have to mix 2kg of powder and the catalyst all at once and use the lot in 45 minutes. We are still married, but it was a close-run thing. This is the stuff we used on the previous previous kitchen 27 years ago. The other half, medically trained, had had the idea that we should use the grouting they use in hospital operating theatres. It was easier then because we hadn’t been doing major renovations, the tiles were self spacing on a mesh backing and we only did the horizontal top. The result was great and then we moved after two years. I kept a broken tile and kept hoping. This time I had left the carpenter to do all the tiling alone, because he volunteered and I am learning, a bit. So there were tiny slivers of tile to grout where someone had worked from the back forwards without a dry run. There were also hard to reach areas, cleverly designed by me, under wall cupboards which, being on the wall, were vertical. This time we had Tinternet and read up what other amateur users of this grout, marked on the tub: FOR PROFESSIONAL USE had done.
Someone suggested using a cake icing device, so I bought a cheap icing bag, discovering stickily after a minute that the bag was very porous and more squeezed on to my hands than the space between the tiles, though it would have been icing shells, which, for grouting, is different. Happily I had invested in heavy duty rubber gloves and didn’t have to scrape it off with fingernails as I did the stuff that ended up on the back of my arms when he was doing the back corner and I was doing the bench in front of the back corner. He fancied and bought, a very huge, manly, rubber float which was good at getting the stuff spread unmovingly on the tiles but a bit rubbish at getting it in the holes. I used the old plastic thing with a nice slim hard rubber edge that I’d found in a bag marked ‘grouting tools’ which I must have put there 25 years ago when I did the tiny tiles on the arch over the bath. Naturally the other half rubbished my tools and strutted a bit, brandishing his enormous float like Luke Skywalker with a 100 watt light sabre. Then he mixed the stiff, toxic chemicals with a broom handle while I held the smooth round tub on the shiny tile counter top, ‘Hold it still, still. Right, we have forty five minutes….. from…. now!’ and we slapped it on frantically like game show contestants out to win the washing machine. It was all very ‘Five minutes to go before it is set for ever!’ and got your heart rate up faster than a run on a Stairmaster carrying a medicine ball. However, halfway through the second tub I sent the carpenter, who was up to three swears a second, to sit down, having remembered that I’m the better grouter and actually like doing it. At the start of the second tub he said ‘No I have the wrong spreader’ (the giant float) ‘give me yours. it’s better, just for this tricky corner.’ Of course I didn’t get mine back, so I used the rusty putty knife and I was still better. The residue has to be disposed of as hazardous waste but once cured you can scrub it with bleach. And bin your clothes. And scrape it off your skin but hope the flesh stays put. And breathe out.
In the midst of all this excitement I have been able to go into a tiny corner and paint. Not walls, mini oil paintings. Here’s Auntie Vera going for a tramp in the woods:
I think she got him.
There’s the gardener I spotted planting the floral clock on Princes Street in Edinburgh, perilously leaning off a ladder and completely ignoring the smart remarks of all the passing tourists. Now that’s what I call concentration.
And this is a quiet corner between two sheds somewhere that looks so peaceful and sunlit that it would make even a grouter relax.
These pictures, framed, will be for sale at Miniatura. Incidentally, in a word to the wise, I will be taking quite a lot of the online stock with me to the show. If you are going to the show and have been ‘visiting’ a doll in the shop you could email me in the next week and ask me to take it, so you can have the chance to buy it post free. Equally, if you are a far flung reader and have fallen in love with something in the shop, I cannot guarantee that stock that goes will come back again. Midweek Min is shaping up to be exciting with more news of intrepid mini travellers, proving, like Tinternet, that it’s a small world, with not enough time.
The carpenter having now taken himself off on a seniors golfing weekend, I can scrub the grout, put the junk from the table on it and, finally, have two entire days to dress a doll! (I have a saved new one, not yet assembled but, I am hoping, china painted.) (I’ll find out at the bottom of the heap.)
Two entire sawdust-free days! (Does Ally McBeal have this problem, we wonder?)
JaneLaverick.com – We can, we can, grout you! Grout you! (Rock on.)