Landlady: Kitchen Nightmares

If you’d told me 15 years ago that I was mad to take one of the kitchens out of Landlady Towers to turn into a bedroom, only to replace it 15 years later, I would have told you that it was in fact you who needed therapy and told you exactly how much money you could make from a bedroom, rather floundering around with two kitchens.

You may not have guessed, but I am on the verge of turning a kitchen I once turned into a bedroom back into a kitchen again. The ‘Bitchen’ has made its money and will now be very useful as a kitchen again, as I’ve had enough of sharing mine with my lodgers. I have a fond memory (not so fond for him, although he was handsomely remunerated for it) of The Big Son at the age of 12 sleeping on a camp bed in the kitchen when it was still a ‘Bitchen’ pupae.

Last year, I had a bit of a meltdown as far as my space-sharing life is concerned. I concluded that I’d had enough of queing up for my own kitchen in a passive-aggressive manner, while a non-gourmet dolt cooked what smells like boiled underpants for hours on end in MY kitchen. I ranted, almost to the point of needing a straight-jacket, that I was going to turn Landlady Towers back into its original two flats, rent out downstairs and live upstairs hermit-like with a subscription to Cuppa-Soup and unwashed-dishes and discarded pants lining the walls.

The Small Daughter, ever the voice of reason, suggested that rather than losing our huge, party-facilitating living room, I might like to consider turning the Bitchen back into a kitchen, just for my lodgers to use. In retrospect, I think she was thinking more of her party-going friends and her reputation as a ‘gathering-organiser-with roof-terrace’, than me. But Hey!

Because I transformed (if you could call it that) the room for an initial £30, the man who ripped out the old kitchen said that for the minimum fee, all he could do was cap off the old utilities, which makes turning it back into the room it once was a furlong ahead of a doddle.

Now, all we have to do is wait for The Big Daughter and Son In Law in Waiting to move out of the Bitchen and buy their own flat, as I’m no longer mean enough to make them sleep in the midst of broiling underpants……