Category: Kitchen

How to choose a kitchen for a new build

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Every house builder has a range of kitchens to choose from. Sometimes you get a house where they’ve already put the basic option in to meet their own timescales, sometimes a sale has fallen through and you get someone else’s choices, and if you’re early enough in the sales process, you get to choose your own.

We’ve lived here over three and a half years, all the while intending to get a new kitchen fitted, and it’s never happened… which meant that when we had the opportunity to choose our own for this one, we went all out.

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Ain’t no sunshine

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I’m trying really hard to think of a way I can get a yellow sofa into the new kitchen without it being absolutely destroyed by Jude… still thinking on that one!

In an ideal world, I would like a buttery yellow, plump Chesterfield-style sofa in something soft, like velvet. It would be deep but supportive, and have big arms to lean against when I’m reading.

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Running the Showroom Gauntlet

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Because we felt like we were making a bit of progress with the kitchen planning, we decided to go and see some in real life. Armed with our plan, our first stop was Wren. No real reason, they just had a good sale on, had a country style that we thought was alright, good colour options, and it’s not too far.

Well. We made the mistake of going just as it opened, and I have never been inundated with so many helpful people in such a short space of time. It was overwhelming. I swear to God, they were popping out of cupboards as we walked round the showroom. We then made the further mistake of loitering at the kitchen we’d actually come to see and Barry cracked when we were approached for maybe the tenth time. That’s a modest estimate.

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Let’s talk kitchens

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The kitchen’s been a hot topic over the last few days – it’s the first biggie from our list of things we’d like to do in the house this year. Because we’ve done this before, Barry’s confident about fitting it himself again, and we have lists of absolute must-haves, would-likes and get-rids.

Putting flooring aside for now, the first thing we’d do in the living half of the room is to get rid of the corner sofa from the old house and put in a four-seater sofa – I’m eyeing up some yellow beauties like this one from Chesterfields, which Jude will no doubt trash within a day, but… look at it.

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Painting downstairs: a catch-up

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I realised that I hadn’t posted some of the most glaringly obvious changes in our house, but there is a reason for it.  We had someone come in to paint the whole of the downstairs but it got left half done and so I never actually wrote about it, still thinking it would be finished off at some point.

Cringing, I’m going back and checking dates; I wrote a post about choosing a green for the kitchen in August, and we had the guy round the same month.  For the sake of showing progress, here are some before and after photos, but bear in mind most of this needs a second coat, no skirts, doors or radiators are painted, and our little toilet is embarrassingly still half lime green and half pale green, six months later. It’s the Harvey Dent of bathrooms.

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