Another house, another kitchen makeover! This is the first proper before and after decoration blog post for the new house – our kitchen mini-renovation. I showed you guys the living room but we didn’t do any ‘decorating’ in there. This time we didn’t go DIY kitchen makeover like we did last time we had a design done and a proper kitchen fitter come and install everything so it was sorted within a week. Whereas, when we did it ourselves it was over a number of months until we had our finalised kitchen.
We had a rough idea of the look that we wanted in terms of marble worktops and shaker style cabinets but we also had a list of gripes with the current kitchen to change.
- The main thing was to get rid of the sheer amount of wood that we had in the kitchen previously as it just wasn’t our taste
- New worktops
- A more modern extractor fan
- Better lighting than the single hanging down bulb that was providing hardly any light
- New cupboard doors
- Extra units on the side of the kitchen that had nothing there as we felt it was wasted space
- Get rid of the ‘wine rack’ section and add a door
- Paint the walls as we weren’t keen on the sage green in a kitchen personally. We loved the colour in our old living room as you guys know but we wanted a fresher feel in the kitchen for this house.
- We wanted tiles or a splashback as having paint so close to food preparation areas had left stains and lots of steam/water marks from the kettle and near the sink.
- Remove the carpet matting near the doorway (spoiler this doesn’t get done!) The floor we have is a bit of a mix between engineered wood flooring and laminate it’s called LVT and is super tough stuff and is really hard wearing and good quality so there isn’t much point replacing the entire floor, it’s more a plan to replace just the matting areas when we eventually can. This’ll include finding the stockist and fitters who did the original floor as it’s apparently quite specialist!
First of all, we had UK Kitchens come and measure up and do us a design, that’s what you can see below in the top of the pic. These guys were recommended to us by a friend who’s had a few kitchens from them and she’s always been really pleased and so were we on the design and the costs.
Then everything kicked off and we were on the way to a new kitchen!
Here are a few during snaps. The whole thing took around 5-6 days work. We had spot lights added in at the end of 2020 in preparation for this transformation and it made the whole room so much brighter.
We added one of our reclaimed scaffolding shelves from our old kitchen and it works really well in the new kitchen even though it’s a lot more modern. We went for a fresher look with light cabinets, stacked white metro tiles with white grout and marble worktops. We added a set-back extractor fan because we didn’t want it to be too imposing but we settled on black as an accent colour and so that the entire colour scheme didn’t look too cutesy.
The decor/trinkets aren’t perfect just yet and I’m still playing with layouts etc but I’m really happy with where we are at the moment. Here are some of my favourite after shots! Check out a little video here of the transformation on Instagram.
Let me know what you think in the comments! Nothing in this blog post has been gifted, we paid for everything ourselves.
