Our future kitchen

We've had a productive/expensive weekend so far--we've officially ordered our new kitchen! The guy we were dealing with at the store a couple of weekends ago left a message on our phone about some additional offers he could give us on the design we chose and we decided to go for it. So that's one thing done on the list of many! We still need to shop around for new appliances. We went to a tile showroom today and saw some that we really liked. The design of the kithen is called "Vermont", can't go wrong with a nice New England name like that! These are the 3D drawings we got from our appointment at the store. It's just a rough idea of what the kitchen will look like. The appliances, tiles and wall paint in the drawings are not what will be having.

This is the view looking at the wall we share with our neighbours

This is the view looking at what will be the wall between our living room and the kitchen


The other side wall



And finally the back wall



We'll post pictures of the floor and wall tiles when we choose them. We're thinking of this shade of green for the walls at the moment

Now to plan the bathroom....

The Plan

There's still a few weeks left before the work starts on the house. We've been to a couple of stores to get ideas for the new kitchen, in fact we're going back to one tomorrow morning to look at a revised plan the kitchen planner guy did. We've also had to start clearing out a lot of the "stuff" we had in storage around the house. I forsee a lot of trips to the tip in our future!

We thought it might be nice to show exactly what it is we'll be doing. These are the plans for our house as it is at the moment: (I just found out you can click on the image to see it bigger)



We're going to be building the extension on the side and also in the back of our house to look like this: (except ignore the little window to the left of our new front porch. The porch is actually going to extend out to where that silly little window was drawn)




On the ground floor we're knocking down the wall between our current living room and kitchen and this will become our living room/dining room and we're building a new kitchen at the back of the house. At the side of the house we're gaining a bathroom and utility room. Upstairs our bedroom and spare room are staying as they are but we're gaining a new bedroom at the back of the house and another bedroom at the side of the house. Also our bathroom is going to be made larger with the side extension.

A time to build up, a time to break down

This is our house. Richard bought it for himself 10 and ½ years ago. It's a two bedroom semi-detached house and was perfect for one person. I moved in nearly 4 years ago (where does the time go?) and it's been a good house for us, but recently we've decided we could use some more space.

Last year we put the house up on the market. It had been on for a few months and we hadn't had much interest in it and also we weren't too interested in any other houses that were being sold. One day during our lunch break chats Richard mentioned that maybe we should just look into building an extension on our house. It's all I could think about for the rest of the day, it was a brilliant idea! We like the area where we live, we just wanted a couple more bedrooms and a bigger living room and kitchen. By building the extension we could have everything exactly the way we want it. I could have a utility (laundry) room! After having a proper think about it, we took the house off the market and got started with the whole planning process of building an extension.

I'll spare you the boring details about the planning process. Let's just say we've had some obstacles along the way, but finally after 6 months of planning (or more, I may have lost track of time), we have an official start date for the building work! The work will start in early May and should take around 16 weeks to complete. I'll be posting more "before" photos soon and will be updating the blog along the way with photos of the work being done and then of course the "after" photos of our new home.