I was expecting the kitchen installers to arrive at 11:00. They turned up early – very much a rarity in Thailand. In fact, they were an hour and a half early. Still, I’d already moved out all the boxes of stuff so everything was already set.

The team quickly got to work assembling the cabinet carcasses, though there were some minor issues. Initially the position of the central “peninsula” was off by around 40 cm. I pointed that out to them, and after a ‘phone call by the team’s boss to the office, that was sorted.

Kitchen peninsula

I was a bit disappointed that I had been expecting customised cabinets to fit around a concrete post in the corner of the room. To explain, the usual technique for constructing houses in Thailand is to pour a concrete framework in situ. (Rather worryingly, no proper quality control on the concrete mix or the pour. You just have to trust the builder to get it right.) The large spaces between the posts are filled with rough brickwork or breezeblocks which are then rendered over. One of the beauties of this system is that one can knock down entire walls (as I did in extending the kitchen) without affecting the structural integrity of the house. The negative is that one has concrete posts protruding into one’s living area at regular intervals. (I really don’t know why they don’t have the posts jutting out on the outside. That would seem to me a better solution.) Anyway, the kitchen company decided that they couldn’t customise the lower cabinet, so the “gap” I’d included in the plan as a space for hanging tea towels is now 10 cm narrower than designed. I don’t know whether there’ll be enough air circulation for the towels to dry.

Kitchen with post and gap

Queue bad joke that I came across a few days ago:

Q. What is the most common owl in the country?
A. The teat-owl.

Also a problem is the width of the work surface. When measuring up the supplier hadn’t noticed that a section of wall is outdented by around 4 cm and taken this into account when specifying the granite slab. This means a new slab will have to be provided. At the moment they don’t know whether they have a suitable piece in stock, or whether it will have to be ordered from Denmark. Perhaps I’ll know today how long the wait is likely to be.

And finally, I was told that the installation work will take 3 days, rather than the 2 that I’d previously been told and planned for, which is a tad disappointing. However, having been without a kitchen now for 2 months, a few more days doesn’t matter. Oh how stoical I can be at times of great hardship!

[696]