Page 20 of Love from Pretty Beach
W ith her iPhone propped up horizontally on a pile of books and recording herself for posterity, Darby stood with her hands on her hips and pointed to the long line of kitchen cupboards on the far wall of the kitchen.
A set of three double, very orange, nasty-looking pine doors looked back at her.
Inhaling through her nose and then letting the air out, she shook her head at her inefficiency.
It had been her plan since day dot of moving into the house in Pretty Beach to get the cupboards off said wall and do a rejig of the kitchen so that it was more Darby style.
To be frank, any style would have been better, Darby or not.
She’d had visions for the kitchen and many of them, yes, so many, but all of them had stayed stubbornly lodged inside her head.
Most of them involved her vast and growing collection of lovely kitchen bits and bobs displayed nicely against creamy walls.
The cupboards she’d earmarked for a deep, dusky-ish Farrow and Ball old-house-in-the-country green.
However, lack of motivation had meant that they had remained exactly where they were in all their riveting, eyeball-hurting pine glory.
For five long years, their orangeness had offended and taunted Darby Lovell.
They had lived a perilous, near-death life since she’d taken ownership and now, they had come to the end of their existence. Let the dismantling begin.
Not having the foggiest about removing cupboards from walls, Darby opened all six doors and stared at various tins of spaghetti, fancy lentils from France, more than one jar of preserved lemons and many lovely dishes and pieces of china collected from the same hospice shop where she’d got stuck in the vintage fur coat.
The cupboards hid a multitude of charity shopping addiction finds.
So be it. There were worse vices in life when one had felt as if one’s life was over.
The odd thrifted white jug and beautiful vintage Meakin had got Darbs through a stitch or seventy-six.
With the camera continuing to roll and Darby commentating as if for her whole life she’d been a presenter of a TV makeover show, like a woman possessed, she started manically pulling things from the cupboards.
Cans of beans, annoying out-of-date spices bought for one recipe and never used again, random things from when the children were small.
A teacup with a broken handle filled with pens, a cracked vintage blue water bottle from Italy, just so many floral mugs.
With the cupboards emptied and their contents spread across every available surface, Darby surveyed the task and gulped.
The orange pine doors did not appear impressed and after her initial burst of activity, whereby she’d gone like the clappers, she now had that sinking feeling that she should not have acted in quite as much haste.
Going down the baby steps route would have served her well.
Baby steps were apparently the key to everything in life.
They got one from A to B without any stress.
They were organised and practical and quite boring, but nearly always followed through.
A slightly panicked feeling rose in Darby’s chest. However, she tried to appear on her recording-away-to-itself phone that she had half a clue what she was doing.
‘Right then, phase two of Operation Kitchen Liberation involves actually removing these monstrosities from the wall. I’ve got my trusty cordless screwdriver, which I bought three years ago with grand intentions of becoming handy around the house, and I’ve watched approximately fifteen minutes of video tutorials about cupboard removal, so obviously I’m completely qualified for this job.
’ Holding up the screwdriver with a flourish, truth be told, Darby had no idea what she was doing.
Nearly dropping the screwdriver, she popped her glasses on to consult the notes she’d been taking in her diary.
‘According to my extensive research, which consisted of googling “how to remove kitchen cupboards,” the first step is to remove the doors. This apparently prevents them from swinging about and hitting you in the face whilst you’re trying to get the carcasses off. Sound advice, do we think?’
Positioning herself in front of the first cupboard, Darby examined the hinges.
She might as well have been asked to diffuse a bomb or dissect a heart.
To her unschooled eyes, the hinge in front of her was a complicated mechanism she could not make head nor tail of.
The phone continued to faithfully record as she continued to commentate.
‘Absolutely ridiculous. There are more screws here than in an entire piece of IKEA furniture, and that’s saying something. ’
Beginning with the most obvious screw, Darby turned it anticlockwise and hoped for the best. The screw came out easily enough, but the door remained stubbornly attached to the cupboard frame.
‘Well, that’s one screw out and approximately seventeen more to go.
This is why people pay professionals to do this sort of thing.
They clearly understand the mysterious psychology of cabinet hardware.
By the way, I got the term “hardware” from that video I watched.
I have no money for professionals. I’ll have to make do with me. ’
Working through the screws, Darby struggled, muttered under her breath and tried not to swear.
Evidently, stuck on a worktop, crouched in an awkward position, trying to get door hinges off was not her skill set.
Through gritted teeth, her face felt as if it were on fire. ‘Come on, you absolute nightmare.’
Eventually, after the last screw yielded, Darby nearly overbalanced as the resistance suddenly disappeared.
As she peered along the row of cupboards, she was kicking herself for having started the job.
With a sinking feeling, she turned and looked at the contents of the kitchen spread on every surface and on the floor of the kitchen.
Why oh why had she thought it a good idea? Too late now and all that.
‘So many screws down,’ she announced to the camera. ‘At this rate, I’ll be finished sometime around Christmas of next year.’
After twenty minutes of effort, during which she had removed enough screws to fill a jar, her right wrist was sore and her lower back was aching.
However, she would be darned if she was going to give up.
Plus, the other option was to refill the cupboards and put the doors back on and there was no way she was doing that.
Finally managing to detach the first door, she clambered down off the worktop and waved it in front of her phone.
‘Victory! One down, five to go. I will not be defeated by orange pine.’
By the time she’d removed all six doors, Darby’s kitchen table was stacked with orange pine panels.
‘Now comes the interesting bit. According to my research, these cupboard carcasses should just lift off the wall brackets once I remove the right screws. The key word there being “should,” which in DIY terms usually means “probably won’t, but we’ll pretend it’s straightforward anyway. ”’
Climbing back up onto the worktop, Darby had visions of herself on the floor underneath a carcass lying there for days, only for Lola to alert the postman that she was incapacitated.
‘From up here, I can see that there are brackets attached to the wall, and the cupboards just hook onto them. In theory, I should be able to lift each cupboard up and off its brackets.’
With not that much effort, the brackets slid away and Darby realised she was holding a carcass.
‘Well, that’s unexpected. I was expecting these things to weigh about as much as a small car. I mean, they’re not light, but I can manage.’
By the time she’d removed the third cupboard, Darby was well pleased with herself despite realising that she would have to do a run to the dump.
Initially, she’d had grand plans of recycling the cupboards and saving them from landfill by putting them on the Pretty Beach Facebook page.
Now with them all over her kitchen, she realised that she would not be able to move unless she got rid of them and quickly.
She was, however, smugly pleased with herself.
Very smug and very pleased. Shaking her head, she couldn’t believe how much of a difference taking off the cupboards had made.
The room felt as if it had let out a long exhale and light bounced around all over the show.
‘I have to say, there’s something deeply therapeutic about taking apart things that have been annoying you for years.
Much more effective than meditation or expensive therapy, not that I have knowledge of either of those.
I only wish I did. Wow, go me. This is how you liberate a kitchen from three decades of orange pine oppression.
Six cupboard doors, approximately forty-seven thousand screws, and one slightly sweaty forty-one-year-old woman with a cordless screwdriver. ’
Putting the cupboard down, Darby surveyed the wall. It looked oddly naked and in surprisingly good condition, more spacious and full of possibility.
‘Look at that. Thirty years of accumulated kitchen storage, gone in one morning.’ Picking up her phone, Darby turned the camera to show the row of liberated cupboards lined up along one side of the kitchen and then beamed into her phone. Talk about pleased with herself.
‘Tomorrow I’ll figure out what to do with all this empty wall space, but for now I’m going to make a cup of tea and admire my handiwork.’