New House Tour - Kitchen

by Bex

And finally on the tour of our new house, the kitchen!  I love being in the kitchen, especially my old one.  It was such a great space  with so much storage and we spent a lot of time in there socialising, cooking, I did all my crafting and sewing in there...  Our new kitchen is lovely but such a different layout being narrower and with much fewer cupboards and side space.  I think we'll love it even more once we have opened it up into the dining room although it'll still be very different to what we had before.

I love the walnut cupboards and although I wouldn't have chosen black, the countertops are very nice.  The biggest issue we've found is a shortage of drawers.  We've obviously lost storage space overall having had 2 built in full size cupboards in the old place as well as numerous kitchen cupboards but fitting in all our cutlery and utensils has been hard.  ALL of my baking stuff is still boxed and our cookbooks are currently on a bookshelf in the playroom (which is also storing all our ornaments and artworks until we are finished decorating everywhere and decide where it's all going to go!) with our other books as we have no other bookcases (having previously had a built in one in the living room too) downstairs.

Anyway, the planned solution is that once we have had the wall knocked down, we'll have a dresser in the dining room which will house all of my cake stands and platters (which are currently still bubble wrapped and stacked in various places), our 'posh' cutlery, table mats, table cloths, our spirits and cocktail bits, serving utensils, jugs, 'posh' wine glasses and various other bits n bobs which used to be in our display cupboards.  I think it'll have to be a big dresser! 

As you can see below, the kitchen also has 2 windows letting in lots of light, although it's probably the darkest room in the house.  One above the sink looks out onto the back garden and one at the side by the path/garden there.

And look!  It even has a green wall already!  :)  The previous owners had a small round glass table in that corner and a big American style fridge freezer on the left next to the tall cupboard at the end.  That wall on the left is the one we're knocking through so we have bought a big fridge freezer to sit against the green wall.  We're hoping that once the other wall is down, there will be space for a small island (possibly on wheels so it could be pushed out of the way under the window) at that end of the kitchen or at least a small peninsula added on to the end of the side on the right.  This would then house all my baking stuff and give us more counter space for baking with the kids, etc.

There are some nifty storage solutions in some of the cupboards we have although I'm not sure this tall cupboard is the most storage efficient.  It doesn't actually pull the shelves out very far so it's not that much easier than having stuff on a normal shelf yet you're losing a lot of space at the side and with all the mechanics taking up room.  

The corner cupboard though, makes life a lot easier, again the mechanics of the system takes up room but it means you can actually access all the stuff you have in the corner area which would normally be very awkward to get to.

The Smeg cooker is pretty sexy and it's fab having 2 ovens and 2 grills, it'll be perfect at Christmas!  The top is taking some getting used to.  We'd hoped it was an induction hob meaning it heats up and cools instantly (safer for the kids as well as being fast to adjust like the gas hob we're used to) but it's a standard ceramic hob so is harder to control the heat which we're just not used to.

Having a utility room is fab, although I really wasn't bothered about having one - all the houses we viewed seemed to have one, not sure if that's an English thing or a house thing having only lived in flats before and never having really looked at houses in Scotland.  

This is where our oil burning boiler is housed and it's great being able to shut the door as it does get quite warm.  Now we have a washing machine too it's also good to close the door on the noise (although I am very impressed with our new Bosch as it's not very loud at all).

It's great having the extra cupboard space and countertop as well.  We've put our microwave, sodastream and food processor out there (as the uglier appliances) to save space in the kitchen and it works really well, I haven't found it annoying at all having them in there out of the way.  The cupboards here are perfect for the extra bits for the food processor, bin bags, washing powder, cleaning stuff, etc. that we used to keep in the big kitchen cupboard.  Other overspill from that cupboard like ladders and toolboxes are now in the garage.  I do love our garage!