Since landscaping my garden for the past 8 months, my interior renovations have slowed down somewhat. In fact, they’ve stopped completely. We have poured all our energy into terracing the garden, building planters and fences, adding a lawn, laying two areas of decking and DIYing some outdoor furniture using pallets and scaffolding boards. So you can see why we might not have had the time to work on the interior as much this year!
If you want to check out our progress in the garden you can find all my garden DIY blog posts here.
Even so, working tirelessly on the garden hasn’t stopped me planning my next interiors makeover. If you’ve been following what I pin on Pinterest, you’ll have a pretty good idea of exactly what I have planned for the living room, hallway and (the focus of today’s blog post) the kitchen.
To be honest with you, the kitchen was one of the most disgusting rooms in our fixer-upper home. So it was kind-of the room we tackled first. It got a coat of fresh white paint (to cover up the oil-and-nicotine stained walls eww) on the day we got the keys. We’ve since painted the existing cabinets (you can see the kitchen cupboards DIY and some gross ‘before’ pics here) which has freshened up the units.
You see, we didn’t want to invest in a new kitchen before living in the space for a while. It made sense to see if the existing layout worked for us or whether it could be designed better. So, for the time being, we’ve lived with the old cabinets, the (rather crusty) old sink and taps, and the scratched worktop. But now, it’s time for a change.
Just last weekend I turned my attention back indoors, into the kitchen. In fact, I dived back into the DIY by upholstering another kitchen chair in the same vintage style as the ones I refreshed last year. We managed to pick up another couple of matching chairs from a retro sale and they needed re-covering. That’s the thing about shopping secondhand – you sometimes just have to wait for the right thing to come along rather than get everything you need at once. But now we have 6 almost-matching vintage chairs – yay!
I think I might have mentioned to you before that I bought a kitchen sink before we moved into the house. However, since living in the space, I’m not sure it’s going to be right. Which is probably why we STILL haven’t installed it, 2-and-a-half years later! Nevermind, I can probably sell it on Gumtree or Ebay if we don’t end up fitting it in our kitchen.
After using the kitchen and seeing how we live in the space, I really like the idea of a corner sink – especially if we’re going to change the layout of the units in the future. At the moment, the window above the kitchen sink looks right onto the back of our neighbours’ house, so I tend to keep the blind closed at all times. So it makes sense to me to be stood in a different area when doing the dishes.
Also, I think that corner sinks tend to take up less space, while giving you an extra ‘mini-sink’ beside the main sink, and draining space on the other side. Any kitchen-planning trick that I can use to make the space feel bigger and give myself more worktop area is a big tick in my books, so I’m looking into finding a low-cost corner sink, ready for when we fit the new white quartz laminate worktop (that we already pre-bought last year but haven’t yet fully installed).
While we’re on the on the subject of sinks, I’d quite like a jazzy tap too. At the moment we have two taps – you know, the traditional hot and cold – but I’d much prefer to have a mixer tap. There’s nothing worse than scorching your hand (or freezing your fingers) by washing your hands under one-or-other of the hot or cold taps. A mixer tap would provide nice warm water at all times, ahhh.
I’ve had a look around and I’m pretty sure that I want one of those Grohe kitchen taps. You know the kind – it has a pull-out spout with different spray types for rinsing vegetables and can swivel 360 degrees. But that’ll come when we finally get round to remodelling the kitchen as a whole. At the moment, we’re planning to finish off the fixer-upper task we’ve started and live with the existing kitchen for a little longer.
So, I’m digging out the huge white tiles we bought from Wickes when they were on sale and I’m buying a pot of that stain-resistant, washable kitchen paint. To be honest, that’s all that needs doing at the moment to get the kitchen up to a much better finish. And that’ll last us for a few more years while we save up for a complete renovation – and I can keep an eye out for deals on materials and appliances in the meantime!
Let me know how you’ve saved money on updating your kitchen in the comments below. I’d love to hear your tips for cutting costs and sourcing kitchen cabinets and plumbing supplies on a budget – I need all the money-saving help I can get! 🙂
This article is a sponsored collaboration. The pink links in the content indicate a sponsored link or information source. The blog post reflects my own experience and the sponsor hasn’t had any control over my content 🙂
