Kitchen of my dreams was no flash in the pan

The handyman – Mr Pete, if you're reading, that's you – has packed away his tools. His VW Golf is no longer parked at the top of the drive, there are no chisels left dangerously beneath the radiator. I miss the chisels. They made us feel as though we were living on the edge. And now, we're almost back to normal.

In autumn, I thought it might be a good idea to change the kitchen. I asked a man round and showed him what we wanted. He promised the moon on a stick. Then he disappeared, never to be seen again. The drawings he promised failed to materialise. There were times when I wonder if he even came round, or whether I just imagined it.

So I asked Mr Pete.

He's a good bloke. He was in work when he started, then he lost his job. "No problem, I'll be able to get the kitchen done more quickly," he said. We took to our planning with gusto; scribbling a few boxes on the back of an envelope, stroking our chins and congratulating ourselves on our creativity.

"Four weeks, you reckon?"

"Tops. Easy."

"Cool. It'll be done by October."

I took my normal approach to budgeting, plucking a figure from thin air and professing to know what I was talking about. "That sounds about right," said Pete and we ripped out the kitchen.

And then Mr Pete got a job.

The project did what all construction projects do: tripled in cost and tripled in time.

Our kitchen project moved forward like a sloth. The movie-maker Nick Park shot 115,200 frames when he made Wallace and Gromit. He placed Wallace in position. Click. He moved Wallace's elbow. Click. He angled Wallace's head. Click. And he made those nano-movements 115,200 times. Our kitchen was like that.

There are times when I wish I'd rigged up a webcam so that we could have recorded our progress. We'd have sped it up then watched it, like natural historians do with cloud formations.

My neighbour, Lesley, asked what we were up to: "Has somebody moved in?"

"We're fitting a kitchen."

"That's the longest fitting in history."

She had a point. It took four months. You can build a new house in half the time.

But new houses aren't millimetre perfect. They're not your dreams made real by a hard-working guy who's happy in his work and thinks you're the bee's knees if you feed him samosas from Morrisons. New houses aren't blood, sweat and toil. New houses aren't a labour of love.

When I'm not writing, I love to cook. And now I can. My beautiful stove seals, roasts, frys, toasts and grills. The handmade cupboard doors are art gallery beautiful. The granite tops, from a bloke in Wednesbury, glisten and gleam. The cheffy tap – you know, the ones that look like a shower head and can rotate through 360 degrees and swooshes water with pinpoint accuracy. I love it.

I'm already missing Mr Pete. His electronic cigarettes, his chisels, his work benches, his blind optimism: "Four weeks. Four blinkin' months, mate. And that's before I start the snagging."

The Guinness adverts of the 90s and noughties popularised a slogan about the virtues of delayed gratification: It was simple: "Good things come to those who wait."

And that's what I learned from Mr Pete.