Kitchen Renovation

The Kitchen has undergone a massive transformation – I think it is the room that has changed the most. As you’ll see in a moment, it was clearly unloved and hadn’t been touched in decades. Here’s how we went about bringing this place into the 21st Century.

How it Looked Before

Here’s a few photos of how the kitchen looked in 2020.

Pretty much everything needed doing – a rewire, new floor, new plasterwork, new units, the full works. Ripping everything out was our first of many jobs.

Out with the Old…

In 2020, we set about giving this place the reset it needed.

That was towards the end of 2020 after the absolutely enormous clearout operation that was necessary just to get started. It wasn’t until the same time in 2021 when we got underway properly with the kitchen renovation. This was a mix of a lot of factors – delays caused by covid, being let down by builders, and serious illness affecting myself and a close family member. The project had to take a back seat for some time.

One challenge we had was working in a room with no exterior windows, in winter, with no power. We were working with a fan heater plugged into an adjacent room, with phone torches in our front pockets. We really couldn’t wait until we got to a stage where we could have the lights on. Onwards we pressed, with the plasterwork done and primed so it could be painted.

There was some seriously dated wallpaper in this room. Multiple layers of it too. But once we got to this point, we could have some fun with painting the walls and bringing in the new units.

…In With the New

We kept with painting the walls white, incorporating the Scandinavian principle of making the walls as bright as possible to compensate for the lack of daylight.

The same was done with the kitchen worktops. White laminate worktops that resemble quartz. The green sink just had to go – it was replaced with a much more contemporary white composite quartz one. Units were grey with silver handles.

The kitchen was supplied by Howdens. We had some consultations with them where they looked at our available space and came up with a great design we could clearly visualise. Their quote was very reasonable, so we went with it and then came the job of fitting it all.

I was getting into a routine where I was rocking up every Sunday for a few hours volunteering my time. I wanted to be here more but unfortunately my day job made that impossible. I’ve learned a lot in the process though and I know that what I have been able to do here has been valuable in taking some load off of dad who works so many hours even without doing a reno on top.

We had plenty of tiling to do here and we went with the same white subway tiles that we used in the bathroom. This got very tedious with cutting tiles really carefully to fit around the electrical sockets.

Then it was getting the flooring down…

…and all the finishing touches were all that was left to do. We used floating shelves for the wall where the sink is rather than more kitchen units as we felt having units on both levels both sides would bring the walls in too much and make the kitchen feel too small. I sourced the shelves myself from Etsy.

There were some edging strips still to apply to properly finish off the corners of the units in the photos below, but don’t worry, we didn’t forget them.

To see this room really finished, look out for the final blog post of this series where I will be showing all rooms fully staged and a final before-and-after of each as well.

I think it’s clear already though that we have well and truly brought the kitchen back up to date. With the kitchen being the heart of any good home, we have given it the respect it deserved.

See you for the next chapter.

Lx