Kitchen gone¶

Tags: house

Every Dutchman that buys a house throws out the kitchen and installs a new one. Even when the kitchen is perfectly OK and even when it is brand new. It is not uncommon for the previous owner to have renovated the kitchen before selling the house in order to get a higher price. Just to see the brand new kitchen dumped in a smoking heap next to the road side…

I’ve lived in rental apartments/houses and I’ve always accepted what was there, kitchen-wise. My parents also often left the kitchen in place when buying a house. So I supposed I’d leave the kitchen alone if I’d ever buy a house.

I’ve bought a house and this afternoon me and my brother ripped out the kitchen:

There was a brand new kitchen in the house. Why did we remove it?

• It was the bare minimum that could be called a kitchen. Just three cupboards and a kitchen sink. No oven, nowhere to cook, no cupboards above.

• We’d have to investigate the exact brand of kitchen and try to find the missing parts (like extra cupboards).

• We totally disliked the colors.

• It was obviously a cheap kitchen thrown in as the old one was presumably totally worn out.

So… like every Dutch person I just threw out a new kitchen :-) Actually, I reused two cupboards and put them in the garden shed to have some working surface to store things on while working on a bike.

In the evening I did some more ceiling painting, getting one of the rooms ready for my wife to paint the walls. It’d be nice to get at least one of the rooms finished soon.