Again the installers arrived early, and things generally went pretty smoothly. The sink and hob were quickly installed. The hob, to be honest, is a bit of an extravagance. I had a perfectly cromulent gas hob. However, having to order a new gas bottle every time it ran out of gas (without warning) was a pain, plus the bottle itself took up quite a lot of space. The original thinking with the hob was that it promised a super-duper, extra powerful, three ring burner to make top notch wok fired food. The reality was that I’ve met more powerful damp squibs. The new ceramic hob has a ring that is supposed similarly to be powerful, though my expectations are sufficiently low that I’m not going to be disappointed however feeble its thermal emanations.

Sink and Hob Installed

The sink is another extravagance, as is the tap. I could have recycled the thin stainless steel bowl which buckled every time the equally pathetic tap was put into use, but I didn’t. What can’t be seen from the photo is that I’m also having a water heater installed. Cleaning using cold water (well, what passes for cold water in a 30ºC climate) isn’t great for heavily greasy dishes. So, rather than give up on the belly pork (or muu saam chan, literally three layer pork as it’s known here) I went for the hot water solution. (The Chinese refer to belly pork as “seven layers of heaven”. That’s really not fair. Why should they have four more layers than the Thais, and why should those layers be more heavenly?)

The wall cupboards went up today and are looking OK-ish. It’s a pity the top and bottom units couldn’t have been aligned, but such is the way of the world.

Kitchen Cupboards

This, however, is the problem area. The kitchen company mismeasured and the provided granite work surface was 4 cm too narrow. The company is, shall we say, less than enthusiastic about owning up to having made a mistake or about rectifying it. Watch this space.

Kitchen Cupboards

Apart from the replacement work surface, all that needs to be done now is for the sink water heater to be installed in a couple of days.

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