Turning a white elephant into a stroke of genius ... sort of

Late last year I "rescued" a kitchen from what had devolved into a sort of garage/workshop with a cooker in it. This was a sort of post disaster recovery after the floods in August. Anyhow, fuelled with excitement over finally having a kitchen where one could swing a couple of reasonably sized cats without tripping over any dogs, I hauled ass over to the temple of Argos in Blanchardstown and purchased some really funky glass panels for use as splashbacks. Before departure I carefully checked the measurements of the space between the sink/cooker and the cupboards above them. Everything seemed hunky dory. I did think the packaging looked kind of big when the acolyte bearing the panels arrived out from the rear depths of the temple, but figured "they're glass, they need a lot of protection".. and blithely hauled ass all the way back home again.

Once home, pausing only to grab the power drill and the rawl plugs, I happily ripped the cardboard off the panel, only to find the packing was minimal and the panels were in fact far too big to fit in the space I expected them to occupy. Checked the measurements again.... I measured centimetres, the bloody panels were sized in inches.......

Then I thought, what the heck, let's just stick them up on the wall beside the table, they'll look kind of nice there... but the new kitchen used to be our garage and rather than plaster walls, they are nice firm concrete or stone or something equally inpenetrable for someone of my minimal home decoration skills.

So now what, bring them back and get a refund? Well, you need a receipt to do that..... wherever it went.. The panels ended up carefully hidden behind the printer table for most of the winter. (So I didn't have to see them and feel like such an idiot..)

Now, prior to the flooding disaster I had a brainstorm about the price of gas heating and got this copper heater/fire removed from the front room. In exchange for turfing the nephew out of his "workshop" as the newly decorated kitchen used to be, we had struck a deal that the front room would be his to install his computer, Xbox etc and for entertaining his mates. The thing is, with the open fireplace, the poor buggers froze their nuts off the whole winter long, and gale force winds ripped through the house everytime the door was left open.

Anyhow, now that winter is "over" and theoretically the weather is getting warmer, it dawned on me that the panels are just the right size to erect across an open fireplace, and with a little double sided tape, are perfect draught excluders. Pity I didn't think of that in December............. :)