I ‘m currently sat on one of the stools at our breakfast bar, red wine in view whilst Stu cooks our dinner for the evening (I know living the dream right!!). We’ve literally just finished decorating this room, like literally! The glue is still drying on the command strips we used to add the pictures to our gallery wall and yet the topic of conversation for the evening …. our kitchen extension! Why??!
Renovating houses is for the select few. I know it can seem exciting on those Handy Andy style BBC shows. The before and after pictures on Instagram make the whole process seem really straight forward, but in reality living through a renovation project takes someone with a steely nerve. Living with dust for months, never being able to switch off in the evening because you have to think about the colour of the door handles in the next room your about to tackle and not really being able to invite friends over because, well you’re a little bit embarrassed about how you live! That part of renovating takes a certain type of person. They’ll tell you time and time again that ‘this is the last one, we’ll never do it again!!” But for some reason as soon as the paint is dry on one project… kind of like childbirth, the pain is forgotten and work has started on the next project before the brain has really had chance to really figure out why!
Stuart and I are those type of people. The insane kind that can’t just sit and enjoy what we’ve created. A think a little of it is down to ambition, a little down to practicality but also a little because we can. We’re very lucky in that Stuart’s a Heating Engineer and very handy with it, so we can do a lot of the work ourself or with friends. By being in that position it seems a waste not to try to make as much money from a property as possible and so that is why for the last four years, we’ve lived in the midst of decorating work and why it’s likely to continue into the future – for the short-term at least!
So yes… now that the majority of construction work is out-of-the-way in main body of our house, we’ve started to think about extending the kitchen! The main reason for this is because we’d like to increase the value of the house, but also because if we do have a third child, the downstairs of our current home isn’t really big enough. By adding a single story extension to the kitchen, we’ll be able to create a much larger family room which will become the real heart of the home. We both have visions of entertaining friends around a kitchen island in the winter or having BBQ’s and being able to retreat into a little lounge area in the summer and it’s those thoughts that are really spurring us on.
We’re definitely in the planning phases and any work isn’t likely to start for the next twelve months at least, but I’ve started to put together a little mood board of what I anticipate the space to look like. I always find this helps with buying furniture in advance because it’s really annoying investing in something, only to find to doesn’t fit with your new home (or room) just a few short months later! A mood board helps me keep a colour scheme in mind so I don’t end up wasting money on things we won’t use later!
Kitchen Extension Mood Board
Whilst the decorating features are pretty fluid at the moment, we’re pretty set on certain things such as a skylight window to draw as much light into the room as possible and anthracite full width sliding doors to give the room a modern edge, but also to enable us to open it up onto the garden in the summer months.
Our idea is to use the extra space to create different zones for cooking, dining and relaxing. We’ll do this using blocks of colour and furniture. Our kitchen is Plummet Grey at the moment, with Hauge Blue by Farrow and Ball in the dining room. I love the way the two colours work together but because we have the option to remove the breakfast bar when we extend, we can replace it with a kitchen island. My idea is to keep as much of the original kitchen as possible to keep costs down, but have a new kitchen island in Hauge Blue. That way we can stick with our exiting colour scheme, but open up the rest of the room by painting the walls in the dining room white which will make everything seem more bright and airy. I’d also like to replace the floor which is currently a grey laminate, to something brighter like these White Floor tiles.
The extension will give us chance to have a much sought after boot room / utility room and I’m looking straight to Rebecca of @rvkloves for inspiration on this as no one does a boot room better than her! Although we’ll probably use the same tiles that we have in the hallway for the floor in there which are the Spitalfields tiles from Ca Pietra.
The final area will be a little informal lounge area in the space which is currently taken up by the dining room now. I want this space to be really light and airy so intend to use lots of pale wood and pinks. I’ve listed a couple of the items in my boot board in the list below.
- Sidedboard
- Berber Rug
- Coffee Table
- Spitalfields Tiles
- Pink Sofa
- Pendant Light
We’re really hoping that a well designed open plan style kitchen will change the way we live and we’re so excited to get cracking.
This is a collaborative post
Spilling life tea has some Cheap ways to update your kitchen
