The Kitchen Kontinued

Our tale continues. It was not long after assembling the cabinets that the King and Queen decided that they should remove the old cabinets before installing the new ones. And thus it is that we have our transformation from a working kitchen to a very large empty room.

"The first thing we must remove are all of these dirty dishes and clutter." declared Her Majesty.

And hence they removed the dirty dishes, the clutter, and the countertop.

"That's all right with me," His Majesty replied, "but I think that we should place our icebox in the royal chambers rather than disposing of it. In that event, midnight snacks will be more easily preparable."

The Queen also had to inspect the new installation of the icebox.

And found it much to her liking.

It was thus, in their bliss of destroying the kitchen, that the King and Queen discovered that behind their cabinets they had a wall.

"Are all walls suppose to look like that, my dear?" the inquisitive King asks.

"Indeed they are not, my love. As you can see, there are no other walls in our house with the same texture as the one you see in front of you. I fear that mayhap we have had much moisture locked back here and hence this mold has grown and now proceeds to weaken our wall."

"What an oddity!" the King noted. "There are outlets in the wall that have all this time been covered by the cabinets that were afore them, rendering them inaccessable and unusable."

"Let us remove the molded wall."

"And the molded particle board behind the wall as well."

Thus it was, that a night, and a day and a night were spent in removing the molded wall and allowing the framing to dry, in the hope that it may regain some, if not all, of its former strength. Regrettably, it would prove that the framing would not have enough integrity and it became imperative that it be reinforced.

Indeed, it was also necessary that the floor be removed in the area surrounding the damaged wall, so great was the damage that had occurred. Underneath the vinyl sheeting their majesties found not only hardwood floor, but also several layers of linoleum and, most surprisingly of all, newspaper.

Alas, it must be confessed that the linoleum, with its added plasticizers, has caused some adverse effects on our beloved King, as can be seen in the picture. As a direct consequence, there have been many incidents of the King being following by Spaniards who claim that he has slain their father.

At this time in the story we digress to a prior point in history when Her Majesty had contacted the Royal Artisans, namely the Royal Engineer, the Royal Food Storage Specialist, and the Royal Oven Cleaner and had asked the three of them to come to her castle in order to aid in this endeavor. She, and the King, conceded that this work would be impossible without their aid.

Now we return to the story at hand. The Royal Artisans arrived from the distant land of Utah. They arrived while the King was working himself to near exhaustion carrying the debris from the demolition to the curb where it would be picked up by the Royal Garbage Men the following day. (Fortunately, only seven garbage trucks were filled in the removal of this debris.)

The King and the Royal Artisans proceeded to replace the molded wall with a new wall (one that contained no mold), the floor with a new floor (also that contained no mold), and reinforcements for the framing. Unfortunately, the Royal Artisans worked so rapidly that the King could not take pictures fast enough to capture all of these intermediate steps, for which he apologizes sincerely.

The Artisans continued to aid upon the Queen's arrival from her duties as a school teacher, even when our King traveled away with the missionaries to preach the Word of our Lord. While he was thus occupied, the Queen and the Artisans installed the cabinets that were purchased from IKEA two weeks prior.

Fortunately, the kitchen designs that Her Majesty drew up were such that only one corner had corner cabinets. The reason this is fortunate is that there is only one corner in the entire castle that happened to be a right angle--that is to say, square--and that the two corners mentioned coincided. This also helped in the installation of the Royal Countertop, which took all three of the Artisans and the King to complete.

However, before the many projects were completed, it came time that the Royal Artisans must return to their home. The Royal Engineer had other engagements which, it must be confessed, paid him much more handsomely than Their Majesties. It was with the tiling of the floor and the laying of the baseboard that our beloved King and Queen were left to do alone.

Furthermore, it became necessary that even the King and Queen return to their duties in education. His Majesty had many math classes to attend and Her Majesty had hundreds of children to whom she must teach music. Hence it took an entire week for this beloved couple to complete the tiling

one bit at a time

and another to finish all of the other projects such as installing the final and largest cabinet

in order to return the icebox to its rightful place in the royal kitchen.

Life for the King became much pleasanter upon the completion of the kitchen--mainly because of the marked increase of the Queen's amiability.