After we discovered that B&Q had missed some items yesterday, Barry gave them a call. Their reasons were many and varied:

• They had the wrong barcode for the cream door pack, so it was still correct as far as the call centre was concerned, so Barry had to ring the store to ask them to call the call centre and change it to white;
• The taps aren’t coming in from the suppliers, so we have to pick another. But we like our tap! I can’t believe they didn’t let us know about this in advance – we can’t fit the sink without the tap! They said it wasn’t in stock anywhere, but it is in Romford! After some furious internet searching, I told Barry to ask them to courier it from another store, but he wouldn’t;
• The wooden maintenance kit had the wrong barcode on our quote, so wasn’t ordered, it was put down with the barcode for an upstand so that’s why we ended up with three of those;
• Hood filters are waiting in store. Of course. Our mistake. Except nobody ever said that. Why didn’t they give them to Barry when he placed the order?

My work colleagues said they could actually feel me seething.

Barry waited for B&Q to call him back, they said they would change the door, the lady also had the presence of mind to notice that the cornice and pelmet were coming in cream, so she changed those as well. Maybe those would have come on time if they’d got the right colour. They’ve just confirmed that they can deliver on 5 March.

What we didn’t mention was the fact that designer hadn’t listened to Barry with regards to the drawers. We think it’s a bit late to notice now, so we’ll just live with it, but she was obsessed with pan drawers and we kept saying that we didn’t have space – we needed a four-drawer unit to put all our stuff in. She’s given us pan drawers anyway.

Barry started painting the kitchen last night; some of the plaster is coming away with the paint, and some of the paint we used had dried bits in it and went all bobbly, so he had to keep going over it and may need to sand and repaint it later.

Rant over.