The delivery driver who brought ours in said “oh, one of the nice heavy ones then” as he wheeled it up the path, which told us two things. One, he has clearly delivered a lot of flimsy kitchen carts. Two, we were about to find out the hard way that heavy is a compliment right up until you’re the one moving it.
Because that’s where the argument actually started, not over how it looks in the kitchen, which everyone agreed on within about four minutes, but over how you live with something that weighs what a small dog weighs. Half the group wanted it parked permanently in one spot, treated like a fitted unit that just happens to have wheels for decoration. The other half bought it specifically to wheel it around, island one day, drinks trolley at the end of the table the next, and got quietly furious every time it turned out to need two people and a small run up to shift it across the tiles.
Nobody budged on this one, for the record. The parkers are still parking it.
The wheelers still wheel it, muttering, usually after a glass of wine, which is not the safest combination but has so far only resulted in one clipped skirting board and a lot of blame going around.
The weight is also, annoyingly, the reason it’s still standing after a toddler used it as a climbing frame twice and a cat used it as a launch pad more times than we’re willing to count. A lighter cart would have gone over. This one just sat there, smug, while everyone panicked.
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Whether to fix it to the wall split us properly, though.
One camp treats an unsecured cart on wheels near a small child as basically a hazard sign nobody’s put up yet. The other thinks bolting a trolley to the wall defeats the entire point of it being a trolley, at which point why not just buy a cupboard and save yourself the bother. We ended up compromising, which nobody’s fully happy with, a little rubber wedge under two of the wheels so it can’t roll on its own but can still be dragged out with effort when someone actually wants it moved. It is not elegant. It works.
What we all agree on, oddly, given how little else we agree on, is that the top shelf fills up with things that have nothing to do with cooking within about a week, a fruit bowl, a stray candle, three chargers nobody claims. That’s less a flaw and more just what happens to any flat surface in a kitchen with more than one person in it.
So the verdict, such as it is: buy it heavy enough that a delivery driver comments on it unprompted, decide early which side of the family you are, and don’t expect the other side to come round. They won’t. Ours certainly haven’t.
