Kitchen post 1

I've been putting off posting to this blog because the 'back story' is so long I can't bear the thought of writing it down. Who has the time in this twilight pre-construction world of boxing and packing and mailing the cat to Brisbane? So I'll just begin in the middle of the beginning, which is to say: before we begin building, but long after we began planning.

I'm sitting at the kitchen table with Sharon, the stylish kitchen designer from Freedom. She's meticulously re-drawing our kitchen so she can tell us how much it would cost Freedom to build it. We went through the exact same process a year ago with Adam. As I think about it now, Adam may have kick-started us on the great Renovation Escalation by designing a kitchen so expansive (and expensive) that building it in the same old place as the last kitchen seemed mad. Why not build a new room for this lovely kitchen, we thought?

Escalation is the defining concept of this renovation business. When we began, Phil and I remind each other, we only planned to build a deck. A timber deck with a pergola and a laundry; my modest ambition being to put on a load of washing without getting rained on. Oddly enough, a year later we're spending several hundred thousand dollars but my 'laundry' is just a cupboard in the kitchen.