It’s all coming together……….

I’ve been thinking, and to say so always makes Hubby nervous.
Since before Christmas, I have been putting by whatever I could towards our kitchen revamp.

Hubby and I are good at kitchens.
We tweaked the one in our first house by replacing the worktops and turning the sink round so that the drainer was in a ‘dead corner’ thus giving me another two feet of working space.  As the kitchen was six feet by 8, every inch counted!
In our semi, first bungalow and the cottage we gutted the kitchen and redesigned it, though in the bungalow it was only the bottom half as the wall cupboards were good. There and in the cottage we put cladding up on the walls and coated them with boiled linseed oil. They looked as good on the day we left as when we did it.
Each time, it has cost us around £1000 for everything.
In the cottage though we made a mistake by panelling the ceiling and trying to cheat with the worktop by using heavy duty plywood and tiling it. The latter didn’t work as we used the wrong grout which always looked grubby, though I had some interesting patterns on my pastry, and the ceiling made the room dark. When we decided to sell, we used the proceeds from our car boot sales to revamp the kitchen by replacing the working surface with a proper worktop, and papering the ceiling, something we hadn’t done before and was a right game, though miraculously it stayed up!
Photo: kitchen when we first viewed the property.

Back to now, and my thinking.
I was looking at the sink over the weekend, a one and a half bowl leisure sink with a single hole for a double tap.
We have to replace the tap anyway as the ceramic washer is damaged and although Hubby has cleaned and reseated it twice, it is proving difficult to source a replacement.
My vision was putting old to new, and having a lovely new tap and worktop joined to an old slightly tarnished sink, especially if fittings didn’t match or after Hubby had cut the hole for the sink we decided to change it anyway and couldn’t get one the same size.

You know where I’m going with this don’t you. Yep, down to the DIY store.

We had a phone call and our worktops are in. We drove down to pay for them and looked at taps. Ouch. Cheapest in the design to fit our sink was £114.95.
Decided not to get one there then. They had a similar sink to ours, but I was afraid to ask the price and my grey matter started to chunter.
The worktops will be delivered on Wednesday morning.

From there, we decided to go to one of the major DIY stores some 20 miles away to look at taps.
Prices were much better, starting at £30 with a ceramic washer or £45 for a normal one.
Lookie lookie over the page…………… sinks. One and a half bowl single holed sinks no less, for £67.
Putting my calculator head on and knowing how much I had in the kitty, I voiced my concerns to Hubby. We’ve decided to replace the sink, which is still in the boot of the car.
Obviously we needed new fittings, so that was another £6, and Hubby announced his saw was blunt and beginning to rust, so that added a little more to the bill, but I had leeway.

Back home, we know we have one cupboard and drawer face to replace as it has started to delaminate. The smaller side of the sink unit is also damaged, but a different size, and to replace two doors out of a line of three may look odd if the match isn’t perfect.
So we are going to replace the 400mm single cupboard and drawer front and also the two doors and drawers on the sink, one of which is 500mm and the other 600mm.
It sounds like I have a weird kitchen, but it all fits. The other two floor cupboards (600mm and 4oomm) are on opposite sides, the larger one next to the cooker and the smaller between the fridge freezer and washing machine. They are perfectly good.
Photo: new cooker in place April 2018

So far, we are well within what I have put by. We replaced the flooring last April when we bought the cooker, and the tiling around the window is perfect, so why change it? There are just three or four areas where the grout needs to be replaced, and then we’ll need angled seals where the tiling joins the worktop.

Once we get started, hopefully it shouldn’t take us long.
Watch this space.

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