OK, so now we’ve torn our kitchen apart, it’s time to start planning our new one. I know that seems strange – you would think we had a plan in mind before we started to rip things out. Believe me, we did, but we had so much remedial work to do before we started installing the new kitchen that we just went ahead and started. I’m a great multi-tasker!
Let’s talk about that. If you take a look at my kitchens Pinterest board, you will see that I have a very particular style in mind. Most New Zealand kitchens are quite minimalist – no fancy details on the cupboards and certainly no trim around the top of the high cabinets. Take a look at the last kitchen we installed. It was pretty plain and simple and much more in line with the type of kitchen in most New Zealand houses. This time though, I wanted something different. I just love this kitchen below, and I think this is a very creative way to make the beams a feature as opposed to a problem.
We have quite a large area now that we decided to move the dining area so we could have a bigger kitchen. If you read my post about removing the wall you will remember that we had already moved our pantry over to where the dining table used to be.
The front door and windows are obviously not able to be moved so we needed to work around those. The other thing that we had to work around was the Lockwood ‘stiffening posts’, but we came up with an ingenious way to sort that – more on that later.
I love to plan and I’m always rearranging the furniture or, when I go to other people’s houses, I often renovate their houses in my head, so when it came to choosing how to plan our kitchen I had some pretty firm ideas.
We started our journey by talking with several designers however, we weren’t 100% happy with any of their designs so, in the end, we designed it ourselves. To be fair, though, we probably picked up ideas from each of them to incorporate into the final design. I used Placemakers online design tool which was actually really good.
After lots of moving things around and changing ideas, here’s what we came up with.
There are a couple of things that you may notice are weird about this plan. First, the 800 pantries stick out through the wall. Because of where the window is, we couldn’t have full depth pantries in this space, and we couldn't find anywhere else to put them, so we decided to cut the pantries from their usual 600mm depth to 300mm. There’s method in my madness here, and I’m really glad we decided to do this. I hate it when things get shoved to the back of the pantry and you can’t find them. I also have a LOT of Tupperware Modular Mates and they fit perfectly within a 300mm deep pantry. This was actually part of the reason we did the plans ourselves – the kitchen designers said it couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be done. We are so happy with our decision to do this.
The second thing you might notice is that this plan doesn’t seem to account for those ‘stiffening posts’ I was talking about earlier. I can tell you, we didn't forget them! As you can see from the image above, one of these posts was incredibly inconveniently situated right where our stove needed to go (we moved the stove over from its original position) so, we decided to build a bump out around the post behind the stove. It’s hard to describe, and you probably can’t see it in your mind’s eye, so you’ll just have to keep reading my blog posts at least until I reveal the completed kitchen. Factoring in this stiffening post also meant that we needed to move the cabinets away from the wall by 80mm. This actually had the wonderful consequence of the bench tops being deeper than the standard! Don’t you love it when a problem turns into a plus!
Here are some 3D images of the kitchen. I bet you can't wait to see it all done!
So, what's up next? Replacing the kitchen floors as there's still some of the rollercoaster effect going on there. It's a nasty job, but someone's gotta do it. If you'd like to get notice as soon as I post about this, sign up for my regular updates. Tune in next week for more!
UPDATE: If you would like to see the finished kitchen click here. For more updates on the renovation, check out the Renovate section of my blog.
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December 6, 2019
Hi, my name is Carol Karl. I live in little old New Zealand. My family and I strive to live the most ‘real’ life we can – by that I mean that we eat real food, we live real lives and just generally be our most authentic selves.
