House Renovations

I wanted to show on here some of the things we have done with the house, and continue to do so as we do more.  So below shows the journey that we went on with the kitchen!!

Here is a before picture...this is from before we moved in.  This is how we saw it right up until we moved in, with a projector on the ceiling, and white boards on the wall and the awful office lights.

We obviously spent a long time deciding how we were going to do the kitchen, and originally it was supposed to be at the garden end of the room but we couldn't get the waste pipes out, so we had to flip it and put it in on the opposite side of the room.  Getting all the water pipes, waste, electrics and everything in here was a pain and involved many discussions with the plumber/electrician.  In the end we had to try and go under the panels, we had to run electrics to the island and across the room by making troughs in the concrete floor...

The office lights were a pain - left big holes in the ceiling.  We put in spot lights and lights to run over the island.

The actual kitchen going in was so exciting.  It was a Magnet kitchen and the design had been many months in the making.  The cabinets went in but the quartz had to wait.  The pic below is from when then came to do the template for the quartz.  We were so excited just to see the template as it gave us some idea of what the kitchen would look like with worktops rather than looking at empty cabinets.

And then... the kitchen was in - but ceiling, floor and paining had not been done yet.  We moved in and used the kitchen like this for quite a while before the rest of it was finished.

The decision on the flooring was probably one of the most difficult decisions to make.  I wanted solid wood, but then we were told that it would expand and contract and wouldn't do well with water spills...we went to laminate with a thick solid top on it, but it seems to scratch easily.  Eventually decided on Amtico but which one...dark wood...oak? I kept coming back to the dark wood and now its in...I don't question whether it was the right decision or not because it's too late now!

I then had to fill the holes in the ceiling from the office lights, paint the ceiling and paint the walls.  In was a major pain in the butt....but THEN IT WAS DONE!!!  If you compare this to the original office picture it is actually amazing what we achieved!

This is a picture from magnet - this is how we perceived the kitchen to look before we started - its at the other end of the kitchen and so was flipped around - but I think it is a pretty accurate picture of our end result! (it is from a different angle however)