Renovations - Kitchen

Back to our 3 year renovation journey that's still not over... the KITCHEN!!
The kitchen must be a girls favorite room to get done. Well, it was mine anyway. Plus, by this point I'm able to shower and toilet in a clean room, so life is looking up anyway!!

i should note, however, that besides doing up the laundry room/bathroom in the first 4 months we also put floor and ceiling insulation in the whole house and put new spouting on the house!!  But those things aren't fun to take pictures of, or talk about. Plus, we just got someone in to do those jobs (I know, we cheat!).

We had decided to do the important and expensive jobs first and as quickly as possible so that the less expensive jobs would be easier to save up for. After all, for $20,000 we could do the kitchen, or the whole rest of the house, but how often do you ever save up $20,000 before "needing" some of it. Its much easier to save up $2000 for a bedroom - you know?

So, here's what we had to start with. 

Unfortunately, the kitchen looked better in pictures than in real life. It was quite deceiving really. No one could quite understand why I was so desperate to get a new kitchen.
However, the what you can't see is that MOST of the wooden cupboards had been used over the years as notepads, and had phone numbers, names, swearing etched in. Not what you want when you kids are learning to read!
The pantry doors didn't close, so we had developed a string system to tie them together and closed.



The stove also didn't work very well. There was one element that only worked on HIGH, one that only worked on LOW and 2 that didn't work at all. So, for most cooking, you'd start the pot on the HIGH element, and then move it to the low element when it was hot enough. and don't even think about cooking anything nice or several things at a time!!

The four drawers beside the over also were problematic. One didn't open at all. One was missing a handle, so we couldn't shut it all the way or it too would be unusable. and the other 2 needed a good ol' heave-ho to open. But, at least we didn't have to worry about the kids getting into our drawers!! :)

The stainless steel counter top was quite nice, I must say. Although the kitchen faucet on top of the window sill was weird and leaked profusely - especially if you tried to turn it!!

Oh, and this is the hole that the "fridge" was supposed to fit in. However, unless you have the world's thinnest fridge, that would be impossible!! So our fridge had to live in the dining room. Handy if you wanted a condiment during dinner, not so much while you're cooking!!

So, there were issues - even if they don't show up in pictures.

So, step one was to go and visit as many kitchen building places as we could. Which was a little bit fun, and a little bit scary. It was fun because you could put all these neat things into your kitchen. Scary because every "neat thing" costs just a little bit more and VERY quickly adds up!! So, one of the first quotes came in at $20,000 at that didn't include any of the building prep to get the kitchen ready - so yucky, yuck, no thanks!! But, as we met with different designers, we got a feel for who we wanted to work with, signed up with one of them, and then could negotiate what we wanted vs what we needed vs what we could afford. It was at this point that I was especially thankful that we were doing the kitchen at the beginning of our project while we still had money. I can think of nothing worse than skimping on the kitchen because you simply don't have the money. Its one thing to have to make wise financial decisions (I suppose I don't need lights that automatically come on in every cupboard, or corner drawers that cost 10x more than a normal corner cupboard!) but quite another to need something and not be able to afford it (hmm, maybe we don't have to put in a stove!).

Step 2: Demolition!!

I think this is Marco's favorite part. If I did any of the work, it would be my favorite part too!

 There was lots of rot to be found. Ugh. Very worrying for the boys. Very gross and dirty for me.

The pile of rubbish grew by exceeding portions every day.

One shouldn't be afraid of electrical wires hanging down, should they? 

The wall between the outside door and the kitchen was removed to add a bit of space to our kitchen and open things up a bit! 

 Kelsey was a great help during the demotion stage. Plus pictures of a 2 year old with a hammer have the added bonus of freaking out overseas grandparents! :)

A high tech solution to keeping all the renovation dust out of the rest of the house was installed. 

The old kitchen window (that was poorly installed at some point anyway) was taken out, to make room for a new bigger, better window. 

Our handy-dandy builder buddy Erik, making sure that everything is done up to code and properly. Things got a bit hairy after they took the old window out and you could see the whole kitchen wall move and sway with every breeze outside. 

And with all the changes, the rubbish pile grew. And grew. And grew.

You can see from this picture that they replaced all the rotten weather boards outside, plus to the right of the door, there are 2 windows that we took out when doing the laundry room renovation. A year or so later, Marco sanded and repainted this whole wall.
Also, part of the kitchen renovation included gutting our other bathroom, as we were about to take a bit of space from that room for the kitchen (in order to fit our fridge in the new kitchen). So, that's why part of the rubbish pile includes a bathtub!!

Renovations, are not without their casualties. This was Marco's leg after he stepped into a hole in the floor, inadvertently. He's got a lovely deep scar now! 

Final yucky part of the demolition was discovering that part of the kitchen floor was not wood, but concrete - probably where at some point there was a hot water cylinder. Unfortunately (for Marco), this was also a few mm's higher than the wood as well. So, he rented a concrete grinder and spread fine concrete dust throughout my entire house. The he filled, just the part that would be seen, with new wood boards to go along with the old boards. (He's so clever)

Step #3 - rebuilding.

Marco is installing a new door and you can see the new floor boards where the old wall was.













I guess we'd already started rebuilding with the new window and whatnot, but its always fun when the Gib boards (drywall) goes up and things start to actually take shape. I should note that we put insulation in all walls as we build, we get electricians in to do the electrical stuff to keep it all kosher and we get a Gib stopper in to finish the walls. In our old house, Marco Gib stopped one room, it took forever and he was never completely happy with the results, so we admitted that some jobs you should pay someone else to do because they do it better and faster!!

 

here's the new fridge box - very wide, and perfectly deep! With a plug in the back too!! Yippee!! 

After this, painting.. what fun!

I should also note, at this point, that friends of ours were on holidays during this period and graciously let us live in their home for a week. It was a big change from microwave and crockpot cooking in the dining room. A big change from dusting the kids off every day, carrying Kelsey to the toilet so she didn't step on a nail, or in a hole. It was such a great holiday. A bit hard for Marco, however, as he balanced his real life job hours, with hours on the house, with coming to see us in the other house, but definitely nicer for me with a 2 year old and a 10 month old!!

My favorite feature of this room was about to be installed. Its probably my favorite because (for once) my husband thought an idea of mine was good. It started out when I wanted a corrugated iron wall. A wall with some punch and colour!!  It took some convincing, but he went along with it. :)

And doesn't that look good??
 I love my corrugated iron wall.

However, then one night as we were still in the planning stages, I asked my husband an odd question. "What's corrugated iron before its corrugated??"
"I suppose its just flat colored steel", he responded.

And, did you know that while a colored glass splash back is about $500, a perfectly matched iron splash back of twice the size is only $13?? Can you see my smile??

So, thus was born my new iron splash back.








Finally, it was the day for my kitchen to arrive!! At this point, Marco had sanded the floors but not varnished them yet. So, they had to be a bit careful about bringing stuff in.
We had hummed nad hawed a few months back about whether we should save some $$ and install the kitchen ourselves. But, wow, were these guys good!! Definitely glad we got them to do it!!
With in the day, it looked great and was done!

All level, bench top (counter top) on. :)











So, after a quick install of the appliances by our lovely electricians, and a final sand and varnish of the floors the room was done. Ahhh...

I wish my floor was always this clean and shiny. 

Look how nice my brilliant back splash looks! 

 My new giant but shallow pantry.
I'm sorry, but side bar here. This is another brilliant idea we put into this kitchen. Deep pantries lose things. Shallow pantries do not. We were already slightly short of space, so this just made the most sense. Its absolutely huge too, because we built all our cupboards higher than normal since we have a higher than normal ceiling.
And, its taken me a few years, but I'm slowly getting all Tupperware for my pantry too.. its AWESOME!

And, of course, my awesome corrugated iron wall. I love the punch of color it gives to the room!

Oh, in case anyone is curious:
 - our kitchen was designed by Rawcraft Kitchens.
 - Our cupboards are Resene Quarter Ash
 - our walls are Resene Ash
 - the corrugated iron is Coloursteel Pioneer Red
 - The benchtop is "Granito Negro" with a textured finish.