The Kitchen Nightmare

I have a pile of work to do and I'm trying to concentrate, but the noise is thwarting me. My study is above the kitchen and today we have the delightful Harry banging away with lump hammer and bolster.

Our kitchen is a decent size but maddeningly arranged in 1908 when there weren't all sots of built in units and furniture. There were originally three doors: one from the hall, one to the garden and another into the scullery. The window is about 6' high so it comes to below the level of normal kitchen units and to top it all off, we have the blasted rayburn stuffed into the chimney breast. To say that the kitchen units and decor are a shade outdated would be kind. It's a horrible brownish 1970s confection of fake wood units, foul lino in a manky brown (and that's when it's clean) and wallpaper that was once fashionable in the very early 70s.

The trouble is, to make any changes to the kitchen is such a huge undertaking. You see, we want to change the coal fired rayburn, which is the dirtiest thing ever invented for something that doesn't require me to fortnightly be up to my shoulder in soot and ash cleaning it out, that doesn't mean that each time coal is heaped on the beast the coal dust and ash billow all over the worksurfaces (that's at least 3 times a day), that doesn't go out if I leave the house for any length of time and hopefully something more environmentally friendly. Is that a tall order? Seemingly so.

We have no gas in the village (remoteness has it's downsides), electricity is horribly expensive and there aren't many good options for electrical heating that I know of, and the price of oil is spiralling. We had thought that an oil fired range would be a good idea before the prices started going insane, but now we wonder if we can afford the range and the fuel to run it! The other possibilities we investigated were LPG; I had LPG at my old place and it's great - clean, efficient and though not cheap, it's very cost effective per unit. Sadly, with a garden the size of a pocket handkerchief, we would have to have the bulk tank inside the house to conform to the Health & Safety rules about having it 3 metres away from our boundaries! The smaller cylinders aren't practical as the house is big enough that they would need changing too often.

Alternative heating methods are ground source heat pumps - wonderful in every way if you have loads of garden in which to lay the pipes. A vertically bored ground source heat pump isn't an option for us even as we're so limited on space that we couldn't even get a mini driller on to the pocket handkerchief. We even looked at air source heat pumps, but it seems that although they are regularly used for industrial installations and have evolved to work down to -20 Celsius, there really isn't any sort of domestic installation available - huge shame as that would cost a negligible amount in electricity and the Government haven't yet found a way to tax air yet!

Anyway, that huge ramble was because we're a bit stuck about what to do with the heating, and until we know what we're doing with that, we don't know where we will have to lay pipes and all the other structural gubbins that one needs to sort out before rearranging kitchens. In the meantime, we have had to trudge from the kitchen, out into the garden and around to the scullery via an outdoors route because the last owners of the house bricked up the scullery door. It's a real pain in winter and most unappealing when it rains. Today, the lovely Harry is opening up the scullery door and hopefully that will be an end to soggy trips to do the laundry and fetch coal. It's all going to be rather interesting and new, though the banging isn't conducive to work at the moment. The cat is having a nervous breakdown at the noise and it must be time for a tea break as the banging has stopped - I had better carpe cuppum and get the kettle on...

P.S. If anyone has a clever suggestion for heating alternatives, please leave a comment!