Home humor: Get out in that kitchen and feel green rattling those pots and pans

Get out in that kitchen and feel green rattling those pots and pans

We have just moved into a house that was built 20 years ago. No mystery there.

But there is something that has been worrying me. If the house is only 20 years old, how come the kitchen and bathrooms look like they are 30 years old? The feral kitchen has bright lime green veneer and the bathrooms are decked out in vivid blue tiles with fake water splashes.

"Maybe the builders were caught in some kind of time warp," my friend Orville suggested.

"Or perhaps they were tripping on LSD," I retorted. "I imagine Timothy Leary would have felt quite at home sitting spaced out on one of our dunnies."

I have since heard from neighbours that the builders of our house were in fact from the former Yugoslavia.

It seems to me that the Yugoslavian men had very minimal exposure to the kitchen, at least.
The women stayed in the house and the men, when they weren't hammering in nails, converged in the garage, drank together and sang together, getting louder and louder as the night progressed.

It is my theory that it was during one of these musical benders they cooked up the kitchen design.

"Wouldn't it be hilarious if we made the kitchen as impractical as possible?" I imagine Drago saying.

"Yes," Slavoljub might have said. 'Wouldn't it be a challenge to make cupboards really deep and tall and useless, put in as little bench space as possible and put a breakfast server so it sticks out and makes people bump into each other trying to get past."

"Ha, ha, ha," I think Zdravko might have giggled. "How 'bout we deck it out in lime green veneer too? Seventies kitsch. We can break the monotony with a few tacky wall tiles depicting nice rustic scenes with horse and carts and people gathering firewood."

"But why stop there?" Ljubisa might have said between tossing back his slivovitz. "What about bright blue tiles with fake spashes in the bathroom, the ensuite and the toilet. And bright blue tiles with pictures of flowers for the laundry."

And so those rooms were born.

It was a practical joke, right? A Yugoslavian practical joke?

The rest of the house is great though so much so that it seemed like a small price to annoy my wife Katherine by resisting pressure to get out in that kitchen and rattling those pots and pans once in a while.

There is an end in sight now though.

We have engaged a builder to give us a new kitchen, which will give us much, much more room and banish forever the lime green colour scheme.

The good news, well for the Slavic jokers anyway, is that I will have to keep crossing my legs for a while yet. The family budget does not stretch to the blue tiles in the dunny just yet.

NB: I called this site Dunno because I kept drawing a blank when I had to put a name to it