The before's, durings and afters 2: The kitchen

The original kitchen with doorway

I thought I could kill two birds with one stone here and show the before's, during's and afters of the wood burner too, but there's so much has happened to bring the kitchen from the three rooms that were, to the one room that is.

It's been a long time coming, but finally, just a little while ago, we finished the kitchen - well, as far as we can for the time being anyway.

When we first got to the house, the kitchen as we now know it, was actually three rooms: a kitchen, a small salon and an entrance vestibule. None of them worked that way for us. We had always dreamed of the 'great room'; that huge expanse of space where we could spread out and just be.

Dark, narrow and very old-fashioned

All the houses we have lived in have had small rooms. Ironic when you think about it as England has some of the biggest people, yet as a general rule of thumb, has houses with some of the most miserly spaces to live in.

Plywood and Formica everywhere -
well-built but had definitely seen better days

Take our last house. It had three bedrooms, yet had a kitchen that was no more that three metres in length - or about ten feet and was less than two metres wide (about six feet or so). I could put my arms out and touch both side walls and if one of us was doing something in it, the other had to stay out. Even the cat was wary of being in there if either of us was. This is what laughingly passes for a family home.

Scary isn't it?

From the kitchen down through the
entrance vestibule

 Our first thought here, was to bash the walls down and open the whole area up, but the closer we looked, the more scary a prospect it became. I'd guess, it wasn't until about our third visit that we actually bit the bullet and began removing the walls. Not a job for the feint of heart, I can tell you.

The original salon

 It's quite a prospect taking walls down in your house. There are structural considerations to be made, but after we had been assured that the walls were not supporting ones, down they came.

As you can see, the pictures give ample reason to want to rip the downstairs to pieces, I mean, we wanted space, not 'spaces' and whilst the demolition wasn't easy and would mean we would have a room downstairs that until we moved in permanently, would feel like a building site, the job had to be done.

It took umpteen trips to the dechetterie with bag after bag of broken bricks, plaster and sundry rubble, but soon we had what we had always wanted - space.

So here we have the beginnings of our great room.

With the walls removed - requiring no small amount of blood, sweat and tears on our part - the amount of space was something bigger than we had on the entire ground floor of our rented house in Blandford.

We've never had anything that big.


We had room to move about, room to put our stuff; stuff that had been in boxes since we left the house before Blandford - about three and a half years in real money.

I spent days and days before we moved here, using Blender to create an accurate 3D representation of our ground floor complete with cupboards, tables, chairs - everything including the kitchen sink!

Once the visualisation was complete, we had the ideas we needed to put the kitchen back together. Of course, so much of what we were hoping to achieve was dependent upon how much money we would have to do it with, and the further into the renovations we got, the more it was looking like it was going to cost us far more than we budgeted.

... and we didn't have bottomless pockets ...

With the addition of our wood burning stove, we're really pleased with the results of our labours. Pen made new curtains for the windows and with the walls and ceiling painted, it's really come to life.

We have elected to leave the floors as they were as being commercial grade tiles, they're more hard-wearing than anything we can afford for the moment, and saves us the bother of trimming the doors.

Exposing the beams was, we feel, an absolute necessity. They add so much character to the room, which at present is a little bland. We haven't had the time to find things to go on the walls other than the pebble clock that I made and the 'Keep calm and carry on' tea-towel that Pen framed, to work as accents.

We had initially planned to keep the original wooden cupboard unit that used to be under the window in the kitchen, but when we pulled it out so that the plumbing could be done, we discovered that it was in foul condition. It had been built when everything everywhere was Formica on ply.

Sadly, on all but the top, the Formica had peeled off, leaving behind the glue that had once held it in place. Had we tried to remove it, it would have been costly and extremely time consuming. Besides, where it hadn't been moved for probably several decades, there was all manner of crud everywhere, making it unhygienic, or to use today's vernacular - minging.

So, as you can see, the old crap that used to be there has now been replaced by new stuff - at far greater expense than we had anticipated, but in the end, it's far more fitting than anything I could have built.

I did have to assemble all the cabinets and drawers, but essentially, the kitchen furniture - worktops, cabinets and drawer units - all came from Brico Depot, coming in at about 20% the price we had seen locally and is far better quality than similar units in England.


It maybe the only room that can be classed as finished, but it's made such a difference.

Next room is the new bathroom...