kitchen

Drumroll….wait for it…KITCHEN AND BATHROOM UPDATE!!!

| Jessica

On the weekend hubby and I took stock of our lovely Queenslander home in SE Qld and decided enough was enough. The never never plan will probably NEVER happen because it will no doubt cost a million bucks of money we don’t have and will literally be 10 years off, by which time we’ll either have moved or died 😉 . So we’re renovating our upstairs bathroom and kitchen! My old mate who did our last set of brilliant renovations has said she thinks she might be able to squeeze in this job, so off to the bank we go to see if they’ll chuck us another bit of $$.

I’ve not shown images of these areas online because it is just too traumatic – the kitchen is a mostly useful space but the bathroom is terribly inefficient in the use of space and needs a complete gut job – the last time it was renovated would be easily 25 years ago and while it was probably good at the time, it’s not a happy place for me or the hubby. So I’ve sent a bunch of images and footage to my mate, to see what she can come up with. I know her style and it’s perfect for the house, so I might even leave it up to her to design me something. I know, WHAT AM I THINKING. But I think her knowledge is so much better than mine these days and she has a great way with choosing cheaper cabinets and benches and making them look amazing. The only thing I will really really want to discuss is the stove and oven – I love the space they are in at the moment, but she might have other ideas. Also, I want a Falcon brand stove/oven. One that has both electric and gas hobs, because I’m no longer a great fan of gas, due to its earth-killing properties, and also because the gas stove we own is awful: doesn’t work properly. The oven door doesn’t close all the way and the handle is missing. This free-standing stove from Falcon is GORGEOUS – 110cm wide with a ceramic hob alongside the gas hobs, 2 ovens, a grill and a warming tray. But there are other fab styles too. Of course, this one is the EXPENSIVE model. SIGH.

Here’s a picture of our current crappy bathroom, which even the real estate agent didn’t really want to show, and our kitchen which has issues:

The toilet, located in its own WC next to the bathroom, has no sink, so its separateness is moot. The entryway to this bathroom is appalling – you have to sidle in sideways if you don’t want to bump into the shower door AND you can see right into the bathroom from the street because that is where the door was cunningly placed. The shower door is etched with limescale that cannot be removed – I’ve tried the magical CLR and it did nothing – and the bath, which we just don’t use, takes up all the space. I want to remove the bath, replace the awful vanity and sink with a LONG single-sink vanity (we don’t need 2 sinks – we need 2 prep areas!) and reorganise the space so that the toilet sits within the bathroom. There’s at least 4.5 square metres of wasted space in these 2 teeny rooms. There HAS to be a great solution.

The kitchen, constructed about 25 years ago, doesn’t even have space for a microwave oven – on the bench it goes, along with our kettle, toaster and coffee maker and bang bang and coffee grinder and compost bin and regular bin and letter holder and everything else I squeeze on there. The pantry door opens the wrong way. There are 2 corner cupboards and I can’t access the rear contents. The sink is misaligned with the window (due to the dishwasher position, no doubt), and has no stacking space for dirty dishes. The stove is nearly dead, and the dishwasher only likes the top drawer, not the bottom, so we have to rinse everything, wasting even more water. UGH.

If my mate can come up with a great design that’s reasonably priced I will be beside myself with excitement. I bet you’re asking now – where do we prepare food if the kitchen’s out of action? Well, we have a good sized laundry with a great sink, and a portable electric stove that we can use downstairs, which means we will actually USE downstairs…, and of course there is a working downstairs bathroom for our abluting needs…

Come to think of it, the kitchen and bathroom upstairs sit ever so slightly proud of the house – we might be able to extend this area a bit more if it still sits under the eaves…hmmm.

In which I confess my Pinterest obsession. Again.

| Jessica

I’ve been having some seriously green moments of late. I’ve been scrolling through Pinterest with the fervour of a demented person, and I’ll have to take a break just to claim my sanity back.

I’ve been loving window seats and banquettes. This may have something to do with the brain wave I had about our planned kitchen/family room addition (sadly on the never-never plan, but a gal can dream). On the bottom right of the plan is the kitchen, which sits along the east boundary. The whole addition is 5 metres x 7.3 metres, which when added to the current room more than doubles the space. The butler’s pantry will be about 1.5 metres wide. The free-standing island bench will be about 3 metres long and about 1.2 metres deep. The kitchen wall will stretch the length of the space, giving us about 5 metres. Once the fridges and appliances are accounted for, there will be about 2 metres of inexplicable room at the end. What to do, what to do?

IMG_2253

My cunning plan is to put in a corner window seat. How ’bout that?! The architect and I had planned for doors to open onto a narrow deck on the south-east corner, but I have a better idea. We will move the doors (yet another repurposed set of French doors to the south west corner. Once again repurposing the kitchen windows (which are beautiful and original to the house), we will place them on the south-east corner and put a window seat underneath, to which I will add a recently purchased 1870 mahogany breakfast tilt-table. I think it will end up being the most popular spot in the house, and certainly the sunniest in the mornings. Huzzah!

This is what I think it might look like:

window seat

Yass.

window seat 4window seat 3window seat 2

This is a version of the table I recently purchased:

Mahogany breakfast table

Tilt tables became popular with the rise of the middle class throughout England and America in the 1700s, and were used for conversation spaces where breakfast and afternoon tea were served. I envisage this table will evoke exactly the same feels. At least, it will make a lovely study space and Sunday-morning-paper-reading space.

It’s no surprise that the images I’ve shown also indicate the type of kitchen I want. As our house is nearly 100 years old, it has a country farm style, and I want to carry that through the kitchen, with Shaker cupboard faces, slightly retro fittings and finishes, and a wee touch of marble (NOT on the counters, because marble stains horribly. Perhaps marble subway tiles in a herringbone pattern on the backsplash).

In the meantime, though, I’m planning the studio addition to the house, which DH and I are hoping may be possible to add sometime next year. This will add valuable capital to the house, allow us to paint the exterior and move the entryway to the front. We will also add another family bathroom at this time. I had a great deal of success with our ensuite, and I know exactly the types of fittings and fixtures I want, as well as the tiles and general design. I’ll stick to the same basic palette of concrete-style floor tiles and extra large white tiles laid in a subway pattern I used in the ensuite, but I’m thinking about a pale blue Spanish tile as the feature:

IMG_2232

I’ll order the same light fittings, but I’ll choose a slightly different mirror. As for the vanity: well, it might be an off-the-rack job, depending on the size. I’ve also decided to add a bath under the shower. It might reduce the size of the room but my children will appreciate it!

 

Kitchen caboodling

| Jessica

Hello, I’m back! I took time off this blog to do some work in the real world and now I’m on holiday (read: unemployed while I finish my PhD) this is a chance to blog about the next thing that happened after the floors went in.

So, I’d said that the only things I really wanted were a kitchen in good working order and polished floorboards. The floorboards have worked out much better than the kitchen, but we were doing it on the cheap, so we went for industrial country. Via Ikea. Our mad Irishman removed what was left of the old kitchen cabinets and they have been momentarily re-purposed as storage for linen. Then DH and I went shopping. At Ikea and Bunnings. This is what the old kitchen looked like pre purchase:

kitchen pre pre renovation

Quirky retro kitsch. However, we didn’t get to see it like this: by the time we bought the house, it looked like this:

kitchen

Beautiful, hey. This is pretty much the sum total of our kitchen prior to fixing it up. Some of the drawers made it into the house as linen storage and the old table is currently being used as a worktable downstairs. The yellow above-head shelves went to friends. Well, anyway, clearly one measly wall of yellow cupboards wasn’t going to cut it. So we traipsed off to Ikea and this is what our kitchen looks like now:

IMG_2397

Weirdly, not that different from the old picture, given the constraints of furniture placement and doors. There’s not much storage space and even less bench space, but it works pretty well for now. We kept the old working stove, which sits on top of a rickety old masonite cupboard, although 1 month after we moved in 2 of the stove elements died, so we’ve been cooking off 2 elements and the oven. I’d like more. And preferably a stove that doesn’t have a rear incline, as all my eggs currently end up on the far side of the pan.

The whole kitchen including labour and plumbing cost around $3000. I estapoled the timber benches myself because I don’t trust Ikea stuff anymore, which was a very good idea in hindsight. Now that I own an orbital sander I can easily give them a brush up, too. So all the benches and bench tops and handles and stuff are Ikea. The 2 types of shelves are Ikea. On the right is an old 30s kitchen dresser I bought on Ebay for $150. It’s not fully original because the original lead-lighting is missing, but that’s fine, because it was cheap. One day I’ll sand it back again and paint it. Probably white, but I’m digging red right now, so maybe it’s best not to paint it at all. I might do something unspeakable. My sister had given me 2 fun posters year ago which served as impetus for the room colours and about 6 months ago we bought the beautiful new red coffee machine. A monster, but then, I have monster coffees. So, red is the theme for our kitchen, with small white bevelled subway tiles sourced from Paddington Bathroom supplies and installed by the good people at Tile Pro.

From Bunnings we bought the super cheap but serviceable sink, and we bought the tap on sale at Trade Link,  a plumbing supply store in Coorparoo. Problem is, the tap keeps coming adrift, so I think it was not meant for a cheap sink!  Either that, or the plumber wasn’t very good. I somehow think the latter, given our bathroom tap has done the same thing. Oh well. It’s our temporary kitchen.

We’ve worked in it for 2 years now and it’s a pretty good kitchen. It’s small but well formed, but there can only be one person in the kitchen at a time, and our friends and kids have a habit of hanging IN the kitchen with us. Not really enough room for lounging about! I like the open shelving, and even though it looks busy in the photo, actually I think I prefer the open shelves and the homey clutter. It’s not easy to keep things clean, though, so we have to rinse items before using them, as our house gets super dusty. I hate the stove and the alcove and want something much more open, but there is time and space to do this later. For now though, I hold my breath that the stove won’t die on us. If it does, it means rewiring the ENTIRE HOUSE. Which we can’t really afford, and which means doing the entire house in a hurry. Not my idea of responsible home ownership.