Back in January 2012, I wrote a post about my desire to get a kitchen in the house. We knew at the time that it was a while off before we could get started on this room due to budgets and the fact that we were getting married taking up the majority of our time and resources, but this didn’t stop us from shopping around for ideas. It’s a brand new kitchen after all, exciting stuff. Now, as we’re getting ready to install the actual thing over the next few weeks, I thought I’d take a look back to yesteryear, where it all began…
One rainy weekend we popped into Magnet Kitchens – it’s about 5 minutes away from our house and had a lovely big showroom to gather some inspiration. We picked out the Innsbruck and loved its simplicity, modern-look and the jazzy cupboard lighting on this particular display. I even snapped the following picture of it back then for future reference and took more of the catalogue when I got home – the oddball that I am. It put the idea into Joe’s head that we should have blue lights running all the way down the room like a runway. I’m not sure about that one if I’m honest…
Over a year later, with actual intentions of making our kitchen a reality this time around, we returned to the same store to get a fully drawn design. We had no extension at the time, and were using guesswork as to what size and shape the future kitchen would be, knowing full well we were at some point likely to have additional space built. If you’ve been following my blog over the past 2-3 months, you would have read all about the construction updates, for this very purpose!
We did this with 3 or 4 companies, and I mention Magnet in particular, because they were the only ones who gave us the time of day, even though we didn’t have estimate measurements. I don’t want to be too negative really, but it’s was a right royal pain in the ass getting any sort of plan in order. And the frustrating thing? We couldn’t start building until we had a rough plan (as we’d need to know where doors/windows/electrics would go). Bit of a catch 22 situation really. One in particular wouldn’t even talk to us until we had millimeter accurate measurements (I don’t want to snitch but it rhymed with schnomeface – subtle no? Yes, I completely made up that word.)
I understand this isn’t going to be the case for everyone, and we’re in a rare – but fortunate – position that we are creating our kitchen completely from scratch and to our own taste.
This is why I’m reflecting back on this moment now. Back then was the start of our kitchen project. Joe and I had absolutely naf all idea how to plan a kitchen. For all we knew, you just picked your appliances and away you go. However, we’re indecisive and not the best visionaries. That day we were given a quick lesson in how to design a kitchen and exactly what would be the ideal layout for the type of appliances we’d picked, and for the different scenarios of layout.
In the end, Joe and I went for a different design from another supplier, which I can’t wait to show you in a post coming soon, but for anyone designing a kitchen in the meantime, this video has some great tips, which really helped us to finalise our plans.