Jon Kågström

Editorial notes: Yet another guest insight by Dr. Put that only took me 5 months to insert into this blog. Sorry about that, yours truly Dr. Pull.

It’s only now – finally being able to relax, stretching out besides the main pool of my hazienda “Maria Dolores” in southern Tijuana- that I am able to put all the events of the past weeks into perspective.

Changes

Let me start by telling you a little story about two daoistic monks that were on their way to the highest situated monastery named Maoshan. Shortly before they reached the wooden gate, a flock of birds shat on their robes repeatedly changing the colour of the latter from orange to a yellowy white. While the disciple struggled, the master remained calm and smiled. And finally he answered the disciples asking look with the words: “It’s good to change”. Rest assured there might be some moral to that story. As per usual.

In Dantes kitchen, where the pullability crew had been lost for almost two weeks, everything changed with the arrival of PM “The Nighttrain” Kågström. You know what they say about nighttrains: There is no stopping them and they always reach their goal. Oh, rest assured indeed! Looking back we accomplished more in those three days of joint effort than in the two weeks before. By only giving up a few unnecessary practices like “writing the blog”, “sleeping” and “eating”. Easy, so easy.

And the face of the kitchen started to change….

PM “The Nighttrain” Kågström is now an honorary board member of PI Ltd.

Distractions

Any great men doing any great deed face constant distraction from different corners of temptation. And it takes a lot of resting assured and per usual-ing to resist them. Dr. Puts Achilles heel was Swedish women. One in particular. And as Hakan from the Ironshop says: “Building with a travelling mind is like riding a blind horse”. Luckily Hakans speciality is Newton and not horses. Or women. Or building for that matter.
Dr. Pulls Achilles heel was Dr. Put being a useless, push-uppy, mindwandering snail. So, in order to focus Dr. Puts efforts, he treated PI Ltd’s number 1 to Swedish cinematic greatness: films like “Brüno” and “Year one” made ALL other options look like a Japanese Lotus graden. Even putting up tiles.

Tiles

“It’s down that road. I know it!”-“How?”-“Well, I have a feeling..” And suddenly you find yourself wandering the outskirts of Stockholm in blazing sunlight in search of the mighty “Kakelspecialist”. It sounds like an old man of great wisdom when all it really is is a shop full of toilets and tiles. But look at the way we were treated: Wearing our stinky builders outfit, that already proved advantageous in getting us some free seats in the T-bana, once again did the job. We were treated differently than the well-dressed Stockholmians. We were treated by the staff as one of them. Which was fun…until they started to use their crazy “builders lingo”. It was then that Dr. Pull showed his true greatness by saying: “We want to put up some tiles. Give us everything we need for that.” And it was also then that the store clerk realised he could sell us anything including useless, ugly-coloured buckets, sponges and tools that are still assessed by PI Ltd’s intelligence department for their function. For all the people that are using this blog as a guide to build their own kitchen (which is an estimated 36% of the world population), one more resting assured: Do NOT carry 3m2 of tiles. EVER. Take a taxi and the driver might just be a retired kitchen builder himself (no kidding!).

Mosebacke

“Where it all starts is where it all ends” is true in so many aspects of this Swedish adventure of Dr Put. With a tear in my eye and a rare selection of endangered animals on the grill, I shall close my platinum Mac Book Pro and go for a game of Polo against the Syrian Royalty. But I could not possibly leave you all without some final advice: It’s really in the surroundings! (as crap golf-players say)

I don’t think Pullability Industries Ltd. could have done such a great job without the help of so many people: Specialists from Canada were flown in to inspect the work at different stages and used shark-metaphors in their advice.

An ACTUAL true kitchen specialist sawed the crucial holes. In the sands of Thailand, Dr.Pull-Brother and his lovely girl (the two of them have a REAL kitchen. And a Jacuzzi! Why am I Dr. Pull’s friend again and not his brothers?) supported us. There was even people making us feel not-so-bad about being hungover (thanks Johanna!) but bad about our slackline skills (thanks Roger!) A martial artist who almost put half of PI Ltd. out of service. (the same half of PI Ltd. who got his ass kicked in armwrestling by a girl just minutes before). A hippie from Urkult who can’t keep track of his dates. A combustion engineer who had a hybrid taxi explained to him. The Nightrain and the wattenpass. And last but least: The Chief Designer! Without her, we would have been like taxidrivers with no onboard navigation. Like trains in the wrong tunnel. Like Joon and Phil. Thanks, Mia! Our hearts are beating like jungle drums.

Curtain call

May life write another chapter in our books of life. In Paris. I promise.

If you have lived in Sweden your whole life, you might know about this. You might even rest assured. All the others shall tremble and shiver along with me when hearing about this.

Swedish craftsmanship

For lack of having proper colonies, the Swedish king (we have all seen his picture wearing a skirt!) has ordered all ceilings in the capital to be built like African bush-huts. Woven -bloody- grass is underneath the gips! One might ask oneself: how does a Swiss guy know what´s behind Swedish gipsputz? Could it be possible that he barely even looked at the ceiling and a huge chunk of the roof fell down smashing the floor next to him and -once the dust and debris had settled- revealing tribal hut construction underneath. Rest assured that yes, it is possible (see pictures underneath).

When the area next to the hole was gently touched to be shown to the apartment owner, the hole (enjoying being in the spotlight) decided to spontaneously expand. Let´s hope that all people interested in ever buying this apartment have stopped reading this text a few lines back.

But as much as they have holes in this country, they also have the best solutions to fix them: ”Husfix™”. A poisonous, irritating, lung-up-fucking material that can fix EVERYTHING. Even Newtons ”Law of Gravitation”. Rest assured that there is always a physicist at hand at your local ”iron shop”.

Recovery

One thing we enforce at PI Ltd. (Pullability Industrial Limited) is proper recovery of the workers on a site. There is several ways to ensure the human resource is at full charge:

• Coca Cola (a small, cute, fjun spin-off company of PI Ltd.)
• Recovery (available in different flavors)
• Trocadero
• a wide range of widely unhealthy food

Impress with progress

This 3-picture-collage shall show the progress we are making:

After a good night of sleep, dreaming about destroying kitchen parts, we successfully woke up and reinitiated the kitchen rebuilding. As we are still in “Project Mayhem” most of our work will be of destructional nature.

A glimpse into the past

This blog series does not only serve as a practical guide for (for amaturs up to experts) of how to rebuild your own kitchen – it’s also educational. Therefore I will try to inject some interesting facts as we go along. The house itself, nicely situated on Hökens gata close to Mosebacke, was built in 1858, this was the year after the big fire on Södermalm that burnt down all houses (even the theatre). I think this also was the same decade our olden king Gustav Vasa liberated Sweden from some occuping forces. Considering how long ago this was (just look at the silly beard), it was to no surprise that the floor looked really bad as it was probably installed in the same epoch (cheap floors during wars). Then all the spilling of food on it for many decades has certainly left it in a very bad shape. So as we are doing this properly, rest assured that we are building a new floor.
This is Gustav Vasa:

And here is the olden floor:

New floor made of cutted planks

Luckily we found some planks laying around. Unluckely the planks didn’t fit on the floor so we had to cut them first.
Cutting planks is really easy if you have the right tools & knowledge (gathered during project Hawkeye). In short, cutting a plank can be done in two ways, either by hand or by a cutting-machine. We got a cutting-machine to do the work for us as we didn’t want to get blisters in our hands.
Look and learn:

Risk assesments

Rebuilding a kitchen can be dangerous if you don’t assess the risks properly as you go along. This is not only a part of “Project Hawk Eye” (see the mission plan above) but also an iterative process that you should take seriously throughout the operation. This is our system: Everytime we encountered a risk one the encountee loudly calls out for a risk assessment: “Risk assessment”. Then the other one carefully approaches the risk and we evaluate it together. One example of this is electricity. After taking safety precautions along our risk assessment we proceed. Here we can see how Philip is carefully detaching a on-off button, note the plastic handle on the screwdriver, the gloves and the face mask (spark protection) :

*don’t try this yourself unless you really know what you are doing (feel free to ask us in the comments if you are unsure)

Day 2 Summary

We did a really good work today, cutting a floor and neutralizing risks, we have learn alot about electricity and wood cutting (easy peasy lemon squeezy). We are not sure what to do next, either we start to reroute the waterpipes or perhaps paint something (would be nice to start on “project Eden” as it’s probably even more fun).

Rest assured that this journey of insight and knowledge will continue.