Renovation - Kitchen

The kitchen has had the most work done to it within the house. This part of the house is formed by two extensions, an original extension built in 1960s and then a further extension on front of that running to the front wall of the house from the 1970s. Because of this, when I got the house there was two rooms in this area; the kitchen itself in the older extension and then a porch area in the newer extension. In between these two sections was the old front door and window frame which was entrance to the house when there was only one extension.

The kitchen that was in the house was ‘new’ according to the lady who sold me it. Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. There’s no way that kitchen was any less than 20 years old! I think she meant that she bought it off someone else who had ripped it out which doesn’t constitute ‘new’ in the eyes of a rational person. It was old fashioned and very dirty and mum and I decided on the first day we got the house it should come out!

I started off by simply ripping out the kitchen. This is an easy job, a crowbar and a big hammer gets it done in a few hours! I also knocked all the tiles off the back wall which the lady who had the house before had attemped to paint and made an arse of! She’d painted over the tiles with emulsion which had then rubbed or peeled off all over the place so it looked terrible (not that it mattered as it was all coming off anyway, but it amused me!). I also pulled the crappy super fresco wallpaper off the porch area which left me with some orange paint to strip.

I didn’t touch the kitchen for months and months then as I was using it for cutting timber, laminate and plasterboard in while I did the rest of the house, working my way back towards the kitchen.

I thought it would be nice to remove the partition and open the kitchen right up into one big room. Originally I thought this was going to be too expensive so I set off without the intention of going through with it but we got a bonus at work so I got my original builders back in to remove the door and window frame and install a wooden joist, opening the kitchen and porch up into a long 7m galley kitchen.

Once the joist was in I was a bit dissapointed with the right hand wall. As you can see above the porch area was battened and then had sheet boarding over, the kitchen area was plasterboarded and half tiled. It looked a bit stupid having it change in the middle and there was also no point having tiles on that wall.

I realised that with that wall having originally been the outside wall it’d just be brick underneath, so I got out my crowbar and went Gordon Freeman on it to leave an exposed brick wall. These are quite trendy these days anyway but I can’t pretend I wouldn’t have gotten it plastered if I’d had the money!

This left me with a lot of fixing to do on that wall. For a start the electrics were now exposed so they had to be ducted, and there was a gap at the edge of the ceiling so I put up plaster coving. Down where the sink was I also uncovered a window into the cellar bit under the stairs, so I had to build a frame around that to take tiles.

The doorway into the dining room was made of a casing that was standing well proud of the wall because the plasterboard had come down, so I took all that out and made a brand new frame and made good all the gaps around it. I also fitted new skirting.

I painted the bricks with a roller to make it easy to see where there were hollows and holes and filled all these with caulk and powder filler.

I then lifted the tile floor in the old porch section as this was lower than the kitchen floor and needed levelling to allow the new floor to run flush throughout the whole kitchen. I also painted the whole kitchen with Dulux ‘Buttercup Fool 5’ mixed paint.

At this point my Dad’s friend Adrian came to install the kitchen itself. He installed all the cabinets, sorted out the plumbing and did the tiling all to a very high standard.

Finally I fit the cupboard handles and the remaining interior fittings, fitted ‘Moroccan Sandstone’ tile effect laminate, installed the plinths and hung all the accessories such as splash backs, shelving and rails. I’m really pleased with the finished result so there’s a few pictures here of the finished thing:

TODO

Validation XHTML | CSS

All content © Ian Atkinson 2000–2008, not to be re-used without permission.