Tag: kitchen

Pinteresting

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I know I’ve mentioned this before, but Pinterest is brilliant!  I thought you may want to see a couple of my boards as they stand.

I keep spotting some lovely accessories and pinning them to my boards, and it’s easy to see if they’ll fit with the theme, so I’d highly recommend it if you’re decorating.  I’ve pinned photos of items on there from B&Q, Wickes, Argos, Dulux, the list goes on…

As an example, I’ve just found these lovely curtains on the left in the Next sale for the living room.  I can clearly see that they complement the room’s theme.  However!  A word of warning.  I pinned this photo onto my Pinterest board and was going to wait until payday to buy them.  Then I thought I’d better get them as they’re on sale.  They were all gone, in every size, when I went back an hour later.  I’m naturally suspicious, and event one might have nothing to do with the other, but if you see something on sale, buy it before you pin it!

This is my kitchen board.  I’m lusting after some gorgeous tableware from John Lewis at the moment, but, being realistic, £9.99 for a cup is out of my price range, unless we start buying one piece of crockery a month!

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Dream a little dream

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I’m not a big fan of purple (so why did you get a purple kitchen, I hear you cry).  The truth is, I was seduced by it’s high gloss sexiness, and I wouldn’t change it.  But all of a sudden, purple kitchen accessories have been creeping in from the periphery, and I need to practice some self-control before it gets out of hand and I actually buy something.

Exhibits A and B, Your Honour.

Don’t tell me they’re not lovely.  I know they are.

The beauty of getting a new kitchen is that you technically then need new crockery, just the same as when the bedroom gets painted, I’ll be getting new bedding before you can say Jack Robinson.  Probably before we even paint it, to be honest.  Nothing’s caught my eye on the tableware front yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Update on the holey radiator – the eBay seller is sending us a new one, so that’s good news.  They’re even letting us keep the one with a hole in it!

K -4 days…

Busy making other plans

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For those of you who are interested, here are the floor plans of our house.  Actually, these are a mirror image and the kitchen’s now extended to where the hall and bathroom were, but you get the gist.  They’re actually the floor plans of our house style from Barratts.

This should hopefully make more sense now for people who are finding it hard to picture where rooms are in relation to each other.

When we’ve finished the kitchen, we’ll need to finish off the living room, and then we are planning to either decorate our bedroom or do the garden.  We really need to look at our bedroom, because we’ve got tester paints on the wall, which immediately makes it look like a work in progress.  When we paint the kitchen, that will also involve painting up the bottom set of stairs (which will be a giant pain), and I imagine the top stairs will get done when our bedroom is painted.  Fitted wardrobes would be nice, but a distant dream at the moment.

Our ensuite will probably be next after that.  Barry’s enamoured with those shower units where you buy the entire thing, no grouting or tiling required, and I know he’s got his beady eye on something similar to go around the bath in the bathroom on the middle floor.  Basically, he hates tiling.  Who can blame him?

The spare bedrooms are the last on the list.  While we obviously want our guests to have a lovely stay with us, the effort and expense of decorating two rooms that get used less than once a month can wait.  But I will make them a cup of tea when they stay.  Fair dos?

Which is best, tiles or wooden flooring? Only one way to find out…

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We’d decided on slate tiles in the kitchen before we’d even thought about getting a new one, never mind knocking down walls and making it bigger.  However, I’m not sure about whether they would go with the units we’ve now chosen, so I’m still wavering.  We’d settled on these ones from Wickes, which were on sale when we first saw them, but now the square footage is getting bigger and they’ve come off sale, they’re looking more and more expensive.  I think we’d have to shop around before making a decision anyway.

Another option is to take the white wooden laminate (discussed previously) from the living room right through to cover the whole ground floor.  However, I’ve been strongly advised by colleagues not to have wood in the kitchen – one leak and it’s all over.  Anyone wishing to share their experiences is welcome to do so!

This is the flooring we have at the moment – bog standard laminate.

One factor affecting the choice of a black/grey tile is the colour we’re going to paint the kitchen.  At the moment, we’re thinking brilliant white on all walls, as colours may clash with the units and they’re enough of a statement on their own.  However, in the show house we visited before we bought our house, they had matt black painted up the stairs on both floors.  It sounds a bit gothic and depressing, but it really worked (honest!), so I think we may do the same.

Now that we’ve opened up the stairs to the kitchen, we could carry that black wall down so that one kitchen wall is black (the wall in the image above).  I’m wavering, because I think very dark grey would work as well, like this Slate (left) from Wickes, but Barry’s set on black.  I bought a tester pot of Dulux Midnight Kiss (below), and painted a splodge on the wall (and a bit on the carpet for good measure).

Either colour would also match the potential slate flooring.  I think some hard decision-making is in order, but we’re committed to painting it in some way to cover up the black!

To counteract the darkness of the floor and the wall, Barry thinks that brilliant white on the ceiling and all other walls is the way to go, but I don’t know if it will be too much with the white high gloss cabinets…any thoughts?

On a completely separate issue, I have to have a mini-rant about the plastering in our house.  Where we’ve removed walls, there are obviously big vertical holes, about three inches apart.  However, in two places, the plaster on either side of the hole won’t meet with a flat, straight line of plaster because one side comes out further than the other.  On one of them, the walls are about perfect at the top, but it comes out about an inch further at the bottom.  These things are hard to explain, but it’s infuriating, and it’s going to be a problem in particular for one of them, because we’re putting the kitchen cabinets in front of it.  At the moment, we’re wondering whether the worktop and upstand can be cut in a curve to accommodate it, but we’ll have to see when they arrive.  Rant over.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be

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My ex-uncle (he used to be married to my dad’s sister) lives about five minutes from our house and loves DIY.  He has any possible conceivable tool, power or standard.  He can advise on plastering, putting up kitchen cupboards, decking, etc., etc.  This gentleman kindly lent his ex-nephew-in-law (can you be an ex-nephew-in-law if we were married after they divorced?) and I his (used) Bosch power sander and a set of stepladders for the various jobs we need to do.

Complicated family politics aside, the sander broke after we’d had it a few hours and so we faced the dilemma: to buy or not to buy the replacement?  Of course, we did, but I really begrudged shelling out £33 on a sander we won’t get to keep and barely got use from.  I’m hoping the stepladders don’t jump out of the car when we’re returning them!

You live and you learn; we will probably just buy a tool next time we need it – at least we’ll get to keep it!  On the plus side, my ex-uncle will be happy and if we do need to borrow something again, he will hopefully be obliging because we’ve been honest.  I say hopefully, because I’m actually telling you before I’m telling him…

On an unrelated note, I thought I’d put up a couple of photos of the kitchen before we do anything to it for posterity’s sake.  Excuse the mess, we’re decorating!

This is the wall (both sides) that will soon be no more.  It holds two radiators, a thermostat, and three light switches that need moving.

There’s a little bay window which would be nice for a table once we’ve got some more space.  The blinds are down because we don’t want people to think we’re complete layabouts without knowing why the kitchen’s in a state!  Not sure where we’re going to put the oven when the wall’s come down, think we can just shuffle it about.

We’re keeping the fridge…

Yes, we had pizza for tea that night…

We’re also keeping the dishwasher and washing machine…

The kitchen is perfectly serviceable and we would probably have kept it for years if we hadn’t have been extending it, but it’s not what we would have chosen ourselves.

If you can’t stand the heat

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Following my mother-in-law’s suggestion, we decided to look into knocking down walls to make our kitchen a larger room.  We think (and so do many of our friends, now we’ve discussed it!) that it’s really small for a house this size.  However, we know we’ll be knocking money off our property by getting rid of a room, albeit a smelly hole.

We did have a builder round to quote for knocking walls down, installing a new kitchen (plus installing fitted wardrobes in our room, but that’s definitely going to have to wait), but the prices were more than we’re willing to pay, so the husband is going to do it all himself, with a little help from the tea fairy (me).

We went to B&Q before making a decision, and vaguely had an idea of high gloss white units in mind.  We were still at the stage where we were testing the water and weren’t really committing to anything, but as soon as we saw this, we knew we had to have it!  The kitchen is from B&Q’s Cooke and Lewis range (as is the photo).

We made an appointment and then a few weeks later sat for an hour having the kitchen designed, with the added benefit of it being on sale as it was January.  If you get installation, they do make you change all of your electricity points (“to ensure they’re safe”, never mind we’re in a new build) and the cost for installation alone was a whopping £3,600, but we looked past that to supply only, which was much more manageable (and they were offering 3 years 0% finance).

Then madness gave way to reason and we realised we’d better get another quote from somewhere to make sure it really was reasonable and we hadn’t lost our senses.  We went to Wickes to get a quote from lovely Malcolm, who quoted us on the Caledonia.  It’s an inoffensive plain white high gloss unit, with integrated handles which I’m not too keen on anyway, but would have lived with if it was the difference of, say, £2k.  It wasn’t.  And my cleaner mother reliably informs me that integrated handles are a nightmare to clean anyway.  Sorry, Malcolm.

I’d also like to point out here that I double checked MSE about B&Q’s units and prices before we sold our souls and there were good reports, but also some scathing ones about the price of their installation.  My guess is that it’s something they don’t really care to get involved in, so they make it worth their while for the times they do.  As a side note, Martin Lewis’ website is brilliant, and I always check it before buying anything major.

So, the husband trotted back to the B&Q designer with our full page of tweaks for another hour of kitchen creation (measurements were slightly off, we wanted white, not cream, a bigger sink and oven, to name but a few changes).

Ah, the oven.  It deserves a post all of its own.  In fact, it’s not just an oven.  It’s an oven and a half.  My mum actually counted the number of knobs on the front from the picture and told me what each of the ten might be for.  Seriously.

B&Q price-matched Wickes and even managed to squeeze in a cheeky wine rack, and I’m really glad they did (price-match, that is) because the colour combo units make me much happier than plain white.  Granted, we were going to tart the white ones up with a flash of colour from a fuschia upstand, but it’s not the same you understand.

The husband called me to ask if we were going for it; B&Q gave him 20 minutes to make his mind up.  I didn’t really need the 20 but ummed and ahed along until we came to an agreeable conclusion.

This was a week last Wednesday.  On the Thursday, he got a call from Indesit asking if they could deliver our new oven on Saturday, very eager.  He managed to put them off a week, but couldn’t delay it any longer, so we’re going to have a random oven until the walls are sorted, the old kitchen is out, the new kitchen is in and we can get a registered gas man to fit it.  The joys of self installation!