Kitchen Project 2011
Like many people, we inherited our kitchen with the house and not only wasn’t it our taste (I disliked it from the beginning but wanted to get the wear out of it), but it just didn’t work. Being a keen cook, I was fed up with the rubbish Whirlpool appliances which were badly designed and basically doing my head in!
I’d had a shortlist of ‘must haves’ for some time and had done plenty of drooling over show kitchens at Grand Designs and 100% Design shows. They were:
- White gloss cupboards with handless profile
- Pyrolytic (self-cleaning) oven
- Induction hob
- Corian worktop with a thick, square profile and moulded upstands, mounted flush with the drawerline
- Square, industrial looking moulded sink
- Built-in microwave/oven for minimal worktop clutter and extra oven capacity
- Reduce the amount of spurs and sockets on the walls
- Bigger (cavernous) fridge and freezer
- Re-site the boiler in the utility room and enclose it, in keeping with the streamline look
- Re-site and replace the ugly radiator
- Boiling water tap, for functionality and to eradicate the need for a kettle on the worktop
- Feature wall, using a natural material to contrast with the gloss cupboards
- Elica ‘Om’ SE cooker hood (looks like a spaceship!)
- Colour-changing LEDs in kick-boards, and flush (invisible) under-counter lighting
The design objective was to create a streamlined, clutter-free, industrial looking kitchen with appliances that were effortless to use. Add interest and variety to the scheme using clever adjustable lighting.
…You could say I had specific ideas of what I wanted 🙂
Work commenced in August and took approximately 4 weeks to complete, mainly due to the templating and manufacture of the worktops.
All the kitchen work and fitting of 8 appliances was done by Woods & Sons, who did an absolutely sterling job.
We sourced the cooker hood and taps from the internet.
So what happened to the feature wall?…
Well, we sourced pebble tiles online (another thing I’ve had my eye on for a while, just needed somewhere to use them!) but we had one tiler bottle it. After two attempts at hanging them ourselves, using adhesive that the shop assistant assured us would ‘hold all three of us up on the wall’ and the damn things falling off again, plus the realisation that unless we employed a capuchin monkey to get the tiles in a tight corner above the larder cupboard, there was no way they were going to work! This caused me some disappointment since the whole scheme had been carefully selected to compliment the different textures and finishes used. Then one night I had a brainwave to create three panels of tiles to hang on the wall, which I would paint the darkest grey I could find (Sanderson ‘Stormy Sky’). So that is what we’re doing… this is a work in progress at the moment but when it’s done I’ll post pictures.
MissLadyDJ 