When we relocated from London to Surrey in 2010, one of the first things we did was to knock down the wall between our kitchen and dining room. I was pregnant with POD at the time and we needed a space that worked for us a family.
This involved blocking the existing kitchen doorway and maximising the space we had with bespoke cupboards. Once complete we replaced all the downstairs flooring with oak so it was more baby friendly. POD arrived on Christmas Day 2010 and the kitchen/dining areas have remained largely the same ever since. Aside from the time my sleep deprived self didn’t put the lid on the blender while making a blueberry puree. As you can imagine it didn’t end well!
Over the years, we’ve outgrown our kitchen especially as POD has got older (and taller!). We decided the best way to create more space was to swap our kitchen and the dining areas around. So the old kitchen would become a dining space and the larger dining area would be replaced with a new kitchen.
We’d swapped rooms around a few years earlier when we lived in London, even re-modelling our house when a loft conversion fell through. This included relocating a downstairs bathroom upstairs, turning what was the bathroom into a kitchen and the kitchen into an entertaining space/eating area.
For this most recent project, we visited various showrooms to see what kind of kitchen styles were on offer. We live in an old house so we were always going to go traditional, likely shaker style, but it pays to look around. Funnily enough, we found a bespoke kitchen we loved but prices started at an eye-watering £35k! So we decided to replicate that kitchen from elsewhere but for much less. Of course, we wanted a kitchen that would last so quality was hugely important.
We were impressed with Wickes from the off. From the initial meeting with a design consultant at our house to the 3D drawings (which helped us visualise what our kitchen would look like) to choosing the right units, worktops and accessories at a local showroom. Wickes cabinets are guaranteed for a lifetime of 20 years.
Before work began, our Wickes installer completed a survey to discuss what needed doing. Our project wasn’t as straightforward as many given we were gutting our existing kitchen and building a new one in our dining room. Plus old houses are always full of surprises so we suspected we might have a few of those along the way!
All our units arrived prior to work commencing on a date that was agreed in advance (around 3 months later). The kitchen and dining spaces needed to be clear so we had a gazebo set up in the garden for our table, chairs and kitchen equipment. Our food and crockery went into the living room with our Smeg fridge freezer staying put but covered so it didn’t get damaged.
The first job was tackling our hundred-year-old fireplace which would house our existing range oven. We’d discussed replacing it with an electric oven, so we didn’t have to have new gas pipes installed, but it wasn’t worth it. The price quoted by Wickes didn’t obviously include extras outside the typical kitchen installation like our fireplace, plastering, gas, electric and water. We wanted to keep our oak flooring intact too.
Our fireplace is over a hundred years old so you can imagine it was a dusty job removing bricks and it had to be done with precision. Once the fireplace was completed, made stable and prepped for plastering, some of our existing oak floorboards were carefully removed to accommodate the new gas pipes.
We were delighted to find an ancient bath beneath our old kitchen floor. The houses in our road were inhabited by printers from a local factory around 1906. It’s widely known all the houses had a sunken bath by the back door but most have been removed over the years. We thought ours had been too but it was still fully intact. A section of the bath had to be removed for the gas pipe but we managed to save the rest of it. It’s part of the history of the house after all. An amazing find that totally took everyone by surprise.
The fireplace and walls were plastered once all the electrics had been done. We’d had some new double sockets put in with the ones in the existing kitchen re-located so they were lower down. The upside of having a new kitchen installed in our dining room meant we had running water for much of the project. Cooking was out of the question as you’d expect so we took full advantage of that takeaway food!
It started to feel more like a kitchen once the shaker style units started going in. There were cupboards on either side of the cooker and large drawers for all our pans, an island (also with cupboards) and almost an entire wall with even more cupboards! We had more cupboard space than we’d ever had before. We made another find beneath the floorboards when the water pipes were being laid for our new fridge (don’t worry the Smeg went to a good home!). It was a newspaper cutting from the Eighties that featured Cilla Black and Frankie Howard!
The material our worksurfaces should be made of was discussed at length. Corian would have been amazing but wasn’t an option so we went with a light Silestone Quartz which is not dissimilar to granite in look and feel. We’d had black granite worktops in the old kitchen and spent way too much time cleaning them! And wooden ones prior to that which never seem to stay looking lovely. The Quartz was made to measure which worked well for us as our kitchen walls aren’t straight like they would be if the house were a new build.
When the units and worktops had been installed, our appliances were put in – a double sink, a dishwasher, a microwave and the new Samsung fridge. We’ve adored the Smeg fridges we’ve had over the years but having a fridge with an ice-maker and filtered water was deemed a necessity. That said we use it all the time and probably drink more water as a result.
The final job in the new kitchen was tiling around the fireplace and beneath the units either side of it (you can see that in our reveal post). We also had to turn the dining area into a cosy place to be. Having been a kitchen, and what with the house being old, one of the walls, in particular, was a bit of a mess. Peeling plaster and a myriad of pipes, some of which weren’t even required. It was, however, all made good and then we set to work with the painting. Much as I relish the smoothness of a freshly plastered wall, it can look pretty dreary until it’s painted!
We’d originally thought our existing kitchen table would be too long for the new dining space so we’d sold it. We ended up replacing it with a smaller table, new chairs and a bench. So our old kitchen is now our dining area and our old dining area is now a kitchen. We adore it and Wickes really did do a splendid job of making it look amazing. The downside being we have the rest of the house to do now!
This is part one of our kitchen renovation project – in part two we’ll be doing a big reveal so you can see what it looks like now it’s finished.
