Kitchen Before And After aka The Results Of The Tart Up.

Longer term readers of this blog (are there any of you left after my sporadic posting of late?) will remember me posting about "tarting up" the kitchen in The New House.  Our budget did not run to a new kitchen and so I went to work on the pre-existing fifteen year old kitchen.

Here is a before.

Before (Complete With My Tote On The Ground)

The kitchen had lots of really good things going for it.  The lay out was great and the cupboards were excellent quality.  There was also lots of natural light and the wooden parquetry floor had the potential to be repolished and sealed.  The down side was that the bench top had really worn out in places and was also very faded and suffering from a lot of deterioration under the window. The appliances also didn't work properly any more. I'll be honest and say the colour scheme wasn't really me either.

Here is the finished kitchen now.

Before.

I got the cabinet maker to remove the doors and spray them in a satiny white finish.  I ummed and ahhed about this for months.  The doors were originally Tasmanian Oak which was OK however I already had a lot of wooden furniture and the floors were also wood.  In the end I decided to go for the painted finish and I am really glad I did.  The same cabinet maker also made me a new bench top out of gloss laminate.    A Caesar Stone one would have been fantastic but it was pretty hard to justify putting a bench top worth that much on to fifteen year old cupboard carcasses.

New knobs were also put on the cupboards and all the hinges that were dodgy were fixed or replaced.  The tiles came away when the old bench top came out.  I almost replaced them with white subway tiles but I decided against it as I hate cleaning grout!  I chose a glass splash back in a smoky grey to go with the bench top.  The walls were repainted and the floor polished and resealed.

Overall I am completely thrilled with the result and am hoping that this kitchen will last for another ten years at least.  The thing that made this worth doing was the fact that the kitchen lay out was very practical and the cupboards were fantastic quality and in relatively good condition.  (I am eternally grateful to the previous owners because all the fittings and the finish of this house are of really high quality.) If you are a handy DIY type (which I am obviously not) then you could keep the budget right down by doing the painting yourself.  Otherwise apparently some panel beaters will also spray doors etc.

So there you go.  My "tarted up" kitchen.  Better late then never.

More Kitchen.