Until we re-did the kitchen in our house, it was my husband who was the cook, not me. I could barely boil an egg they were always either hard as a rock or the white was still clear.
The kitchen was in desperate need of change. It was dark and freezing cold, with a crabby little convection hob, a broken grill and revolting, sticky blue lino on the floor.
It didn’t matter we had no children and ate out most nights or ordered takeaways. My husband cooked about twice a week.
But the kitchen was so depressing we had to do something, so I gave it a full facelift. It was a masterpiece.
So much so, that I decided to teach myself how to cook in order to spend as much time as possible in my new favourite room.
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This all makes sense, according to a survey from Houzz, the sharing website platform for interior design, which found that renovating a kitchen leads to major lifestyle changes: 43 per cent of people who have just had a kitchen re-done cook more meals at home; 23 per cent eat more fruit and vegetables; 36 per cent say that they order in less.
No matter how much TV chefs insist that healthy home-cooked is quick, easy and delicious, nothing is easier than ordering a Deliveroo, and who can resist a pizza?
If you want to eat healthily, it takes time, effort and planning. There is shopping, chopping, mixing, waiting and then, of course, all the washing-up.
In order to step away from the food delivery app and put your pinny on, there has to be an additional incentive. Perhaps, an element of living out a fantasy lifestyle.
And, though I wasn’t much of a cook, I still had pretty firm ideas about my dream kitchen. For a start, it would have to be flooded with light, so I knocked down a few walls and extended into the side return, putting three Velux windows in the ceiling.
I also threw out all the horrid, buzzing strip lights and replaced them with spotlights. Well-lit, Instagram-worthy meals, eat your heart out.
The shelving would be open, so I could see everything. And I hung a rail above my cooker for utensils, small pans and sieves.
I also wanted a larder for no other reason than I thought they looked the business. So I bricked up an unused part of an old passageway, tiled it in beautiful, dark green metro tiles and ran wipe-clean white shelves around the walls. At the back of the larder, on the north-facing wall, there are slate cool shelves for leftovers, cheese and vegetables.
In the winter, my larder is the same temperature as my fridge, only six times the size.
Little did I know that, years later, a larder space was going to become a sought-after feature 40 per cent of those re-doing their kitchens opt for pantry cupboards, such as the covetable Oxford painted larder, £949 from The Cotswold Company. And one in ten make space for a walk-in larder, as I did.
We needed a lot of counter space too, for all the bread-making and pastry-rolling I envisaged my husband doing.
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So, in the middle of the kitchen, I built a huge island. In the counter (made from Corian, which is what they have at the famous River Cafe kitchen in London) I had a hole cut and fitted with a lid.
Underneath was the compost bin so that when you are chopping and peeling, you can lift the lid and sweep everything through the hole.
On the advice of a friend, I got rid of all the cupboards and created storage in the form of pull-out drawers.
‘If you have cupboards,’ she said, ‘you’ll spend your life crouching down and rummaging about in them’.
And so, when it was all done when the drinks fridge was installed and the reading nook was finished, when the zinc-topped kitchen table arrived and the cook-book shelves had been filled I was the one who wanted to be in there. Then I had to teach myself how to cook . . . but that’s another story.
My kitchen has stood the test of time, but I can’t help daydreaming about under-counter refrigerators and freezers, which pull out like drawers no more peering into the back of a tiny fridge for the mango chutney.
I’d swap my cornflower-blue cabinets for something darker and more sophisticated and incorporate the latest trend for rough wood such as old scaffolding planks and gnarled walnut slabs, combined with copper accents.
Then, I’d love my kitchen so much, I might even start stuffing mushrooms for supper.