As most of you will know by now, our kitchen renovation has been delayed *cue violins*
However, this hasn’t stopped us from looking into what we want, and what we can achieve for various budgets. After all, it’s going to happen eventually!
I’m still hoping that we may have all the building work completed by the end of 2013, meaning January won’t just be about chilling in a onesie all day, feeling particularly chubby after eating everything in sight over Christmas – although I imagine this will still very much be the case.
No. It will also mean we will be shopping to buy our kitchen. The actual kitchen. The white glossy units that we long for. The kitchen appliances that I’ve dreamt of for over 2 years. The matching crockery that we’ll need (we only have 3 plates right now – and they don’t even match. Oh the horror!)
With this in mind, at the beginning of the summer, Joe and I started to book in appointments at a number of kitchen suppliers to get some design and layout ideas for the space we intend to build (you can see the plans for that here).
In terms of budget…HA. We were really naïve when it came to this area.
Joe and I believe that spending money towards a good solid kitchen that will last for years is money well spent. Plus, it will add good value to the house.
BUT (and this is a big but) there is spending money, and then there is just overspending.
We had a figure in our minds of a maximum spend we thought would be a good price for a basic kitchen – after all, we don’t want anything too fancy. Just a white kitchen. No fancy granite worktops. No handcrafted fixtures or designer appliances. Just a good quality yet simple kitchen. Most stores were significantly above the number we had in mind, so automatically ruled them out as contenders for our kitchen. That being said, we still got some great layout and measurement ideas and we did find one store which came within our budget. I’m not going to mention any brands just yet, because I’m quite sure they’re not supposed to give you these plans and designs but we sneakily took some pictures on our phone whilst they weren’t looking. Oopsy.
Before you scroll down to see them below, I’ll give you a reminder of the state of the kitchen currently.
Pretty sweet, right? Below are some of the designs we liked the most. Apologies for the bad quality. Like I said, they were taken incognito on our phone. What do you think? I think it’s going to be bad-ass!
