Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Kitchen So Bad It Needs Its Own Rating System

What is it? Put bluntly, it’s one of the most chaotically unusable spaces ever featured on this column.
Where is it? Dollis Hill, part of the sprawling north-west of the city that starts in Maida Vale, takes in Wembley, and then goes on forever, in a cone, taking in the entirety of the rest of the planet. Everywhere On Earth Is Technically North West London.
What is there to do locally? I just searched the words “Dollis Hill” on Twitter to see what the best activities I could find were, and “go and see the house David Baddiel grew up in” and “go to the Ear Wax Removal Centre in NW11” seemed to be the only two viable options. If that doesn’t excite you then there’s a park nearby, too, but not a park I’ve ever heard of, and I instantly distrust parks I have never heard of. This is because, as best I can tell, there are three types of park in London: the “warm bag of cans and a foil BBQ sizzling sad and raw on the grass” park, like every birthday party picnic you’ve been to in London Fields; there’s the “joggers pelting full force into mums with prams” parks, like the short-grass bits of Hampstead Heath; and then you have places that you see on Google Maps that look like a nice shortcut to an unfamiliar pub you’re meant to be meeting some friends in, but as you cut across it it’s basically just an acre of broken glass and people who, honest to goodness, in the year of our lord 2020, still sniff glue. Some parks aren’t worth planting flowers in because humanity will destroy them before they bud. Parks made of dandelions and condoms yellowed in the sun and dirty dummies and dog shits. If I have never heard of a park, I assume it is because it’s just a single squeaking roundabout with a lad stood next to it, aggressively trying to sell me a CD-R with every Crash Bandicoot game, unaware the last 22 years have happened.
Alright, how much are they asking? £900 p.c.m.

Not to kitchen-shame, but I think we need to go through this corner kitchen, fault-by-fault, and give it a Kitchen Rating® (scientifically-derived rating of a kitchen, from good to bad, with axes for both usability and aesthetics) along a four-point system.

So let’s do that. Let’s start our Wednesday doing that:

1. The doormat – this kitchen doubles as the front doorway, so I suppose it also triples as a hall – is not a doormat, it’s a bathmat. This is an astonishingly bad first impression to make. A bathmat as a doormat can only be a sign of things to come. It is absorbingly portentous. -1 Kitchen Point®

2. While we’re on soft furnishings, the curtain is chaotic in two different ways: it is not long enough to cover up the door, three times too long to cover up the window, and not wide enough for both. I would understand if this curtain was designed to block the light from the door alone (why do we have glass doors? They are fundamentally useless) but you will note the curtain rail goes along the entire length of the door–window arrangement, suggesting it is for both. Are you supposed to pull the curtain along sideways at an angle, careful not to drag it into the two (two!) inexplicable sinks, to cover the window? Or are you meant to bring your own small curtain to affix over that window instead? As we will find out shortly, this kitchen is also the room your bed is in, so if you don’t want to be woken up by ambient daylight seeping in through either the door or the window, this is a problem you are going to have to rapidly solve. -2 KP®

3. The fridge is a half-sized fridge in a full-sized fridge hole. Why. -1KP®

4. The fridge (half-sized) is directly next to a cupboard (full-sized), a cupboard that you cannot open because of the position of the fridge. Which makes me distantly wonder whether the size of the fridge (half) is a feature, not a bug: the fridge is smaller so it’s easier to slide out of its fridge-hole so you can open the cupboard more easily. Somebody thought about this problem and came up with this solution. -1KP®

5. The oven is a full oven with a four-burner hob, a rare treat in this column, but it has not been incorporated into the worktop even at all, just bolted on at the end and plugged in with visible trailing wires, so it negates all the Kitchen Points it wins by being practical by also being aesthetically disgusting. 0KP®

6. The extractor fan seems to be plugged in to one of the two available electrical sockets in the kitchen, and the fridge into another, so if you want to use a kettle or a toaster you’re going to have to be inventive with how and where you plug them in, which is just a ball-ache you do not personally need when you are just trying to make a single fucking cup of tea. -1KP®

7. The position of the washing machine directly next to the front door is practical, sure, but it isn’t very elegant, is it. 0KP®

8. The listing describes this as a “good size kitchen area”, a lie. -1KP®

9. I think, if I came to in an underground bunker, cold grey concrete below me and around me, double-locked blood-red steel door that I pound my hands against until they are raw, screaming into a muffled abyss then, panting, hours later, caked in my own filth and tears and sweat, realising no one can hear me, no one can see me, no one can help me, that this is my reality now, and I started to look around the bunker-cum-prison I was locked in – the rust-framed single bunk bed with thin foam mattress, the rough jumpsuit I’d been zipped filthily into, the ominous steel bucket in the corner, thick with the residue of whoever lived and died here before me, the flickering fluorescent light, the human fingernail carvings above my bunk, and I looked around and saw this kitchen, I think I’d go: “Yes, that is in keeping with the surroundings I am in,” and therefore -100 Kitchen Points®

This kitchen gets an unheralded zero on the Kitchen Rating® system. 

We have yet to truly confront the fact that the kitchen is the bedroom, though. Here it is from the other angle, as proof:

So you have your wardrobe, there (always the same too-tall, cheap-pine, cheap-varnish wardrobe, in every! Single! Shitty! Flat! In! London!), then a secondary “spare” wardrobe, which is a piece of furniture your landlord had in another flat, and it started to fall apart, so instead of putting it in the skip they moved it here (always the same too-fragile, cheap-MDF, cheap-veneer wardrobe in every! Single! Shitty! Flat! In! London!), and then you have a chest of drawers, a sort of drawered TV stand hidden in the corner, and then a plastic desk/table, and another curtain hung like a prisoner from the window. You will notice, of course, the fact there is no bed, because you have to bring your own bed. The only place for the bed is in the exact middle of this room. Which, as discussed, is your kitchen. This earns the kitchen another -1KP®.

Then we have the toilet, which: small, but fine. Like: it’s small. We should learn to deserve better from our toilets. We – even you – deserve a better toilet than this. But it’s fine. It’s a toilet. How pleasant does it have to be? I mean: it could afford to be about 80 percent more pleasant than this. But it’s still just fundamentally the room you go to shit and look at Instagram in, and it does the job at that.

Then the shower room – which, from the floorplan, it’s clear you have to walk through to get to the toilet – which is just like looking at a sad sigh. There are rawl plugs embedded in the tiles that are never going to get filled in. The last occupant left the door hook they used to hang their towels on, which brings an oddly depressing spirit to proceedings. There’s a sad electric shower head that has the same grey energy as an unerect penis, and then there’s the leftover shower fitting for the previous shower, which I assume broke, and instead of taking it off or fixing it they just installed an additional shower over the top of it.

I mean, come on. This is what strikes me about this place: come on. We see shitty flats on this column every single week of the year, but they often have some gossamer-thin artifice of being looked after over the top of them – a new washing machine, maybe, a fresh white coat of paint, not enough to change a cupboard into a palace but enough to suggest that somebody has thought minutely about the comfort of the person who might one day exist there – but this looks like the person who owns it booms their head in quickly once a year to check there’s no visible mould they can penalise the outgoing renter for, checks the lightbulbs are working, then double-locks the doors again, only remembers the property is even there when they drive past it accidentally due to roadworks or get the annual July email from the person paying rent there saying They’ve Thought About It But They Will Be Looking For Somewhere Else To Live From August.

A message for whoever owns this, everyone else can look away: for fuck’s sake, man! Have some pride in your little fucking shithole! At least fill the drill holes in in the bathroom! God! Being a landlord isn’t even a job and you’re still somehow failing at it! How bad is the rest of your life! I hope it’s terrible! I hope it’s living hell for you!

Come on!

@joelgolby