We moved house in April and the main thing I wanted to change in the new house was the kitchen. Unfortunately the boiler died the week we moved in so our money for a new kitchen was spent on a boiler. Our kitchen is in the basement and is therefore dark. The previous owners appear to have decided that instead of using light fixtures and fittings, they would go for a dark approach. The end result being the the floor is black and the surfaces worktop is black. The cupboards are dark brown . Absolutely none of this makes me feel like spending any time at all there.
There is also an island which cuts the already small kitchen in two. It means you struggle to get anything into the oven and, whilst it provides extremely useful worktop space, it does little else. The storage is very poor to say the least. There are three usable cupboards which makes life very difficult. We moved from a house with thirteen cupboards so we are ten down! I put a bookcase in next to the fridge which works really well, I even used a CD rack as a spice rack! It has helped but I would love some built in storage.
This is the view of the kitchen from the bottom of the stairs. You can see that there is very little natural light. Unfortunately the light fitting in the kitchen is not very efficient either which really doesn't help.
For some reason, the hob is next to the sink, this leaves you nowhere to put washing up and is a real pain. This is the view from the cupboard under the stairs. I would love to get rid of the cupboards in the fireplace and put a proper range or just a normal cooker in their. Ultimately, that is where the cooker would originally have been.
There is also a potentially very useful space under the stairs which is currently a bit of a cat area. I am sure it could be so much more than this though, even with all the cat accessories.
I dream of a light and bright kitchen, one which maximises the space available, without cutting the room in half. The floor and units would be light and the worktop solid wood. In this vision there is also good lighting and no island. This would require a lot of work. I have created a Pinterest board with my ideas, so here is my dream kitchen. I envisage a kitchen where the table is in the middle of the room and the activity happens around it.
This would be a renovation project because we want to completely remove the island, rip up the floor (preferably laying underfloor heating), raise the lintel above the fireplace so that the oven could fit in and replace every kitchen unit. Just writing that makes me feel tired!
This would be a renovation project because we want to completely remove the island, rip up the floor (preferably laying underfloor heating), raise the lintel above the fireplace so that the oven could fit in and replace every kitchen unit. Just writing that makes me feel tired!
Luckily for me, my dad is an architect so he is on the case with designing a new kitchen for me. Even more luckily, my mum used to be an architect and has already designed one for me. The only stumbling block is the cost. We literally have no money so currently my dreams will not be lived out for the foreseeable future. Hence my entry into this competition. It would give us a huge shove in the right direction.
