After 4 months, our kitchen is finally finished.

When Neil got home from golf yesterday, I told him we needed to drive down to Almeria, again, to swap the handle for the right one.

As we would (hopefully) only be on the store for 10 minutes, we decided to take the dogs with us so, we settled them on the back seat as normal, made sure we had the wrong handle and the receipt and started out on yet another trip to Almeria.

The store was relatively quiet when we arrived and I managed to speak to someone at Customer Services straight away. I explained what was wrong and she told me to go to the kitchen section and she would send someone over. 10 minutes later, I was back at Customer Services as we hadn't seen anyone to speak to. Neil by this stage was ready to help himself to a handle and leave, but I tend to be a little more patient and want to do things right - my days of running out of stores and across carparks are well and truly behind me (not that I used to, but I couldn't if I wanted to now - oh, you know what I mean!)

Eventually, after another 10 minutes, the guy we saw on Saturday, that was so pleased to be able to give us our final doors, walked towards us - looking anything but happy.

I explained the problem and he kept telling me the door's were all correct. It took me a while to make him understand that the doors WERE all correct, but one of them had the wrong handle, which I had in my hand! Doh, my spanish isn't that bad!

After a few more minutes, he seemed to finally grasp the problem and told me he would check if they had any spare handles to our kitchen and climbed up to a display on the higher level and started rooting through a drawer. It would seem they have a drawer full of orphaned handles - one of which was for our kitchen. Success.

He told us to take the right handle and the wrong handle back to Customer Services to make the exchange. When we did, Customer Services couldn't have looked less interested and so we left, quickly. We had our handle. If the paperwork wasn't correct for them, it certainly wasn't our problem.

So, an hour and 15 mins later, back at home and the new handle was in place. Finally, the kitchen was complete.

We accept that we have fitted a lot of units and that it was unlikely that Brico Depot would have enough in for us on our first visit. We accept that a 2nd visit was not unreasonable to collect the missing items that had been ordered for us.

What we find frustrating is that on the 2nd trip, they only had the cupboards and none of the doors.

On the 3rd trip we only collected half of the doors because they had ordered 10 doors expecting them to come in pairs, and they didn't. We actually needed 20 doors.

We then needed a 4th trip because the doors didn't come wth hinges, we needed to buy them seperately! (But nobody had mentioned it).

The 5th trip was to collect more doors, but they still hadn't all come in.

So, Saturday was the 6th trip closely followed by a 7th for the handle.

Each trip takes half a tank of deisel at €50 per tank.

Each trip takes an hour and 15 minutes - each way.

I reckon we have done 5 trips more than should have been necessary so that's 12.5 hours of driving and €250 in fuel. Plus it's taken 4 months to finally get a finished kitchen.

People keep telling me things take time in Spain - but I think this is taking it to extremes.