The first thing our house in paradise needed was a modern kitchen and my husband and I decided we'd handle everything ourselves. Paradise for us is a remote Greek island where we've invested our tiny nest egg in a cozy stone farmhouse in a mountain village.

The kitchen floorboards, with hand-forged nails, could have been planks from an old pirate ship. Once we got the 150-year-old cedar flooring removed, dirt was all we found underneath. Our kitchen needed a foundation, so for a solid week we dug and dug. To get three feet down we rolled out countless wheelbarrows of dirt and we hauled massive rocks out the doorway. We hoped we'd unearth some pirates' gold coins, but our sole treasure was a heavy glass inkwell.

Just as our would-be kitchen started to resemble a large pit, trucks delivered our sand and gravel. A smooth layer of sand went in first, topped by a humidity-stopping plastic sheet. Then came the gravel. That took us days of effort, as we battled swimming weather temperatures. We had no time to lose, since we needed an exterior door for our kitchen before summer came to a halt and the rainy season hit.

Steel mesh covered the gravel. The day that went down was a sure sign our efforts were getting somewhere, except that nine neighborhood cats joined ours in mistaking our kitchen mess for a gigantic litter box.

Next we hauled 40-kilo sacks of cement up the hill to our house. Our cement mixer churned and clunked for 11 hours. With cement, our kitchen floor started to take shape. A spirit level assured things were even. Once the cement dried, walls got plastered and portions of walls tiled. A few times during our weeks of labor, a neighbor's trio of goats trampled in and had to be shooed out of our workspace.

Finally the floor tiles went down. Measure, mark, chop. Measure, mark, chop. The kitchen had never seemed so large! As is often the case with DIY, things take days longer than expected.

A new door was the final step. Once the frame was in place, measurements were made and we ordered a wooden door - with a dog flap, because our pooches don't fit through the cat flaps elsewhere. Possibly it was part of celebrating our finished kitchen project, but one of the first visitors was the neighbor's lamb, who fit through the dog flap perfectly.

Q: Why is there always one kitty who can't figure out the flap?