As domestic goddesses go, I make a pretty good blogger.
I’m about as domestic as the average not-very-domestic-thing*.
I’m not good at keeping my house neat or organised, and I’m
not at all handy.
However, those of you who follow me on Twitter
will know that I like to cook.
I’m not too shabby at it and I have some nifty kitchen
appliances. The kitchen is my favourite room in my house.
I’m one of those annoying people who tweet photos of food
they’ve created, like this gorgeous cake:
Or like these wonderful cake pops:
Yes, those are mutant cake pops and they’re in the bin,
where they belong.
I tried to melt the poorly-named "melts" in the microwave, as instructed. Suddenly
the microwave started making pop, hiss and bang noises, accompanied by a suitably
dramatic light show.
Cake pop melts don’t melt on the stove top, even over a bowl
of gently boiling water. False advertising if you ask me.
White ones turn to concrete.
Blue ones start to melt, then turn to weird blue glue that
won’t attach itself to the outside of a cake pop. No matter how hard you
scream, cry or swear.
I couldn’t give those splodgy blotchy blue monstrosities to
other people’s children, so in the bin they went. Next to them went the red
melts which no doubt would have melted perfectly on the stove top but by that
time I was ready to murder the inventor of the cake pop with one of the handy plastic
cake pop sticks supplied so helpfully in the kit.
Breathe.
The new, firework-free microwave** is now installed and I’ll
be checking the state of mind of all my kitchen appliances regularly to avoid
any more suicidal mid-baking-disasters.
It makes me wonder about the rest of my kitchen. We live in
a hundred-year-old-house that’s starting to fall apart.
I am as handy as I am domestic, and our house needs some
love.***
The last person who renovated our house did it all
themselves - clearly
without the help of experts like The Good Guys Kitchens. Witness the lack of ventilation under
the house. Witness the non-existent ground drainage. Witness the inexorable
progress of our house down the hill on which it was built. Oh the humanity.
Thanks to ill-advised DIY renovations, despite keeping my
house clean, a new life form is growing on our kitchen bench top. The idiot
person who renovated our house used very poor varnish on the wood**** and it’s
deteriorating. The varnish is now sticky, so when you pick paper
an appliance your hand something up off the bench, nine times out
of ten you’ll find it’s fused in place for posterity. Next to the sink,
water permeates the wood and has created Fred:
Fred is a new alien life form. Or maybe mould.
Whatever he is, he’s big and ugly and growing each day. At
this rate our house will soon be nothing but a large brown stain with a car
port.
We need a kitchen renovation. In the meantime does anyone
know how to remove Fred?
Failing that, does anyone speak alien mould?
What renovation
disasters have you seen?
* I was thinking maybe a big cat, like a Cheetah. Although
apparently they’re actually the biggest of the small cats. I know they’re the
only large cat that purrs, because I’ve heard one. Then I realised a Cheetah is
fast and I am built for comfort, not speed, and then this whole comparison thing broke down.
** So far.
*** And new drainage, floorboards, weatherboards, cupboards and bench tops. Love is definitely not all you need.
**** Yes badly-sealed wooden bench tops in a wet area. I don’t. Even. What?
