A New Home

When I moved from my flat on Kronenstraße I wasn’t sure what to do with my kitchen, in which I loved to and, in fact, more or less learned to cook. It was only simple but it was very practical and, apart from the oven door shattering once, and the oven timer developing a weird buzzing noise, very reliable. It was the first one I’d bought and I was lucky that the person in the kitchen studio took the time with me to get the details right.

In Germany, it’s common to sell things like the kitchen on to the next tenant. However, as it was not clear who the tenant would be when I moved and the landlords had been advised not to buy the kitchen themselves (issues of liability), we faced the risk of u having to dismantle and remove the kitchen after moving. So we decided to bring it with me to the Waldlehne with the prospect of potentially reusing parts of it like the drawers in Astrid’s flat in Cologne.

We did indeed decide to use the oven here, despite the buzzing (it’s intermittent and never for that long) because Astrid’s mum’d oven was extremely confusing and no one seemed to really know how to use it: a lot of functions depended upon turning various knobs on combination. And,a couple of months ago Astrid took a small cupboard to her place.

Well, yesterday it was time for the wall cupboards. After trying, and failing, to get the back seats in the car to go fully flat, we were still able to squeeze them in even if Astrid couldn’t see properly out of the rear view mirror.

Astrid hat bought the kitchen in her flat from the previous tenant and, while it was no great shakes, it had the advantage of being one less problem to worry about at the time. But it was also obviously cheap and nasty with the cupboard doors starting to show their age. The work surface is from her landlady who seems to embody cheap and nasty: it’s too dark to see anything on and sensitive to things like cooking oil. But I think she got the material cheap, so it’s Saul Goodman!

Taking down the old cupboard proved pretty easy once we worked out how remove the downlights. Even more gratifying was that the “new” cupboard fit fairly well on the existing mounting.

It was interesting to compare the two cupboards and amazing to see how little differences in the way they’re built add up: the door hinges, the way the shelves are fitted, etc. And, while the new cupboard might not be entirely level, it makes the kitchen a lot friendlier.

Hope we can get rest moved and installed over the next couple of months.