The following photos might explain my lack of blogging. There are only so many hours in the day and mine have mostly been spent working on project kitchen, in between working to pay towards it, whilst also trying to maintain my social life and relationship!
First some before photos, please note lack of cupboards (do not be fooled by large cupboard on right this housed the boiler), and lack of worktop space. What you cant see is how cold the original tiled floor is as this is straight on top of the earth below. No footings on this part of house. This photo was taken from the original door way in the corner of the room.
The stable door was sweet but dark, cold and impractical.
First job involved moving the door into the kitchen which had been done a few months before when we did the dining room. This was our temporary step, treacherous in slippers following a glass of wine.
Once the kitchen had arrived and the builders were ready to start work on raising and insulating the floor and swapping the back door and window over, Jus and I began packing away what we didn’t need for the few weeks (under the ever watchful eyes of the dogs). The rest had to move into our temporary kitchen/storage room aka the dining room. Always one to love bashing things up Tom got the fun job of breaking the old cabinets up.
Meanwhile the new kitchen kept on arriving and was taking over the whole house. As we had to get some of the kitchen on interest free finance we didn’t dare start any building work until it had arrived. Typically it then arrived really quickly from Ikea and we were tripping over it for weeks before the builders could start!
Once the builders and plumber were ready the real ripping out could begin. We did this to save paying someone else to do it and we also took it all to the tip ourselves. The first job to do involved moving the boiler, so we could centralise new doorway to enable a galley kitchen with cabinets either side. Not as easy as you would think and we did end up needing to buy a new boiler. Ours was cheap and about 5 years old, but still going strong. We were hoping to just move it onto the adjoining wall it but as it was cheap, no one really stocks it or it’s parts anymore so a new sideways flue plus refitting was almost as expensive in the end as a new one. We decided to bite the bullet and get a new one rather then risk having to fit a new one anyway in 1-2 years. This did delay things slightly though as it meant scraping together more cash that we didn’t have! Fortunately the kitchen came in at a good price due to a 3 for 2 appliance offer on when we bought it.
The new door couldn’t be ordered until the hole had been made so we did go for about a week with the new back door boarded up and no access to the back garden. Words cannot describe how dusty the rest of the house was at this time but this image may help give you an idea. Whilst we were waiting for the door the electrician then put all the wiring in before the plasterboard went up.
The new wiring meant we required a new fuse box as ours was old, so this along with plumbing in the boiler (oh yeah I forgot to mention most of the gas pipe to old boiler was dangerously narrow), meant most of the floorboards were up upstairs. There was no escape from it!! And it did feel like no matter how hard we had budgeted the costs were spiralling, an old house is like a can of worms and once you open it you just can’t ignore it.
So now we had two door ways opposite each other and a blank canvas to build our kitchen in. First we had to paint it. Then build the cupboards. Word of warning do not do this alone, tired, in a dark house as a I did and have a huge fridge freezer cabinet collapse on top of you!
I next needed to fit the underfloor heating so we could tile it. First you have to seal the floor, which had insulation under it already, with a reflective latex type paint that comes in the kit. Then you just roll the heating out on top. I had to trust it would work as there was no electricity to this room at this point so no way of testing it before tiling eek! The electrician had put a power point in ready to hook it up once the entire kitchen was in.
The after photos will be on the next post!
