“So you’re thinking of changing your kitchen? Great, why don’t I help you.”
Who would have thought something so simple could change so much? We certainly didn’t….
December 28th, a nice lunch with my parents led to us agreeing they would help us renovate our kitchen. My dad was looking for a project and since my mum was going to be in Las Vegas for a week he thought we could arrange it around that.
How hard could a kitchen renovation be? It’d be a bit messy sure, but it’d be fun. Oh. Really? You don’t say.
So without further ado, here we go.
First off, here’s a photo of the kitchen before we started.
The oppressive partition.
So it was a pretty simple setup – a massive, light absorbing, oppressive partition in the middle of the room. A dining table on one side and the rest of the kitchen on the other. It was not a great layout and made the dining area far from relaxing or romantic. In saying that, we’ve had some fantastic nights at that table, with friends and family eating and drinking their full. Arguments have been had at the table as have great laughs. They were just all a bit dimly lit 
We kept saying “we really should get a light put in the ceiling”. We said this to my dad and his response was “well just put a new ceiling in, it’ll be easier”. Ok, I thought, let’s do that.
So we started pulling down the partition, as you can see below. The cupboards were the first to go. Amazing how 2 tiny screws held so much crap up
While removing the partition, my dad and I got a taste of just how badly this kitchen had been put together. As we tore down the plasterboard, we found 2 screws, yes 2, not just 1, going straight through the power cable to the extractor hood. I’m very glad I didn’t touch one of those screws!!
So on we went, tearing out wood and plasterboard until the partition was gone. Immediately it opened up the room and gave us some idea of what we might end up with.
A room with a view
Already the room felt huge and open – exactly what we were looking for. If it wasn’t for the lack of extractor hood and the big joint down the wall and across the ceiling, we’d probably have stopped there!
But alas we went on and began putting in the new ceiling. Have any of you ever put in a new ceiling? I hadn’t. Turned out my dad hadn’t either. How hard could it be? Build a perimeter support and then a truss system going across with supports to the ceiling. Nae borra. Well, some borra actually.
The sky is falling down. No, wait, just the ceiling.
Here you can see the new ceiling going in. It really does look simple, but when no 2 points of each wall are the same distance apart, it does make for a very bespoke frame. I can also say that a 1.8m x 0.9m sheet of plasterboard is very heavy when held up above your head while someone slowly screws it into the ceiling. Arms of steel I tell you. Arms of steel.
My dad estimated that this new installation would take 2 days max to do.
3 weekends later, this was the result.
Don't go to the light!
So obviously it hadn’t been plastered at this point, but we were really chuffed with the result. We opted for 13 3W super LED spotlights from B&Q. Each light was just over £9 and the surrounds were about £7 each. Not bad really, considering the amount of power they use.
At this point I should say that I had suggested that the power supply to each light was run down a conduit in the far wall to be made accessible from a small hatch, so that all maintenance could be done from ground level without the need to fish about with a hand through the light hole in the ceiling. I was told by both my dad and my neighbour, who was helping with the electrics (and by helping I mean did the lot and I am extremely grateful for his help), that that was a stupid idea. I bowed to their superior knowledge. More on that later.
At this point we started to think that we should really go kitchen shopping. Seeing as we were quickly losing the use of our kitchen it made sense to start planning the timing of the new one. As it was just after Christmas, most of the big kitchen retailers were having half price sales, so off we went to Magnet to see what they could come up with. After much deliberation, cogitation and mastication, they came up with this:
The dream kitchen design
We fell in love with this design. The beautiful painted duck egg cabinets and the rounded end cabinets, with the solid granite worktops was too much to resist. The fact that they also designed a new, matching layout for our utility room made us want it even more. Then they told us at half price it was a smidge over £13,000. Ok then. Bye bye. We managed to haggle them down to £8,000 which we were willing to accept, with some help from my parents. Still bloody expensive though.
So with the new kitchen booked in, we had to push on. Pushing on meant ripping everything out, preparing the electrics, getting plumbing moved, preparing the walls to take the new weight of the cupboards then to get the whole thing plastered and painted before the kitchen went in. So just a little bit of work then!
To cut a very long and complicated story short, by this point my wife and I were pretty stressed. We were still learning to cope with an 8 month old baby, we were living in a building site, there were issues with how my dad was doing things and how I was dealing with those issues. There were issues between my parents and my wife and I that were so bad that my wife almost left me so that I wouldn’t need to choose between her and my parents. Yes, it was that bad. It wasn’t the kitchen that caused the issues, but it was the kitchen that highlighted many of them and brought them to a head.
We ended up having a very unpleasant meeting with my parents and calling the whole thing off. We simply couldn’t take any more of the stress, arguments or mess. We cancelled the kitchen order and thanked my parents for all their help but decided we had to do this ourselves. All of the relationships were too important to destroy over something like a kitchen. It was a real shame to end up there. My dad had done so much and had put in a lot of time and effort and for the most part had done a good job, it was a shame to say “thanks but no thanks”, but at the same time, there were too many issues for us to carry on.
So there we were. No new kitchen coming, a bomb site of an existing kitchen, a lovely ceiling and a lot less cash to finish the job than we started out with. Yay!
At one point, this was our entire kitchen:
Itty bitty living space.
In the end we decided to go for the very first kitchen we saw, which was from Ikea and cost a whole let less than the one we had originally ordered. Sure, it wasn’t a duck egg blue, it didn’t have rounded end cabinets and there wasn’t a single crumb of granite in sight. But it was our kitchen, we chose it and we paid for it. That felt right. It also meant that if we fucked it up, we didn’t have anyone else to blame, which also felt good.
Between a neighbour and ourselves, we got the rest of the prep-work done, got the place plastered and then went booked the painter in. A few days before the painter started work, one of the spotlights stopped working. I checked the bulb, I replaced the whole light, nothing. If you wobbled the cable, it went on and off. So it was a dodgy connection at the power supply. So, according to those who told me not to worry about such things, I did as instructed and used the slack in the cable to pull the power supply towards the hole so I could unplug it and sort the issue. It got stuck. I pulled. It wouldn’t move. I went to an adjacent light and pulled that one, hoping it’d free the caught cable. That cable unplugged itself. So I had one faulty light with no access to the socket and one unplugged cable, with no access to the power source. Remember that suggestion about putting the supplies in an accessible cabinet? Mmmhhhmmm.
So how do you deal with such an issue? You cut a hole in your beautiful newly plastered ceiling. A hole big enough to get your whole arm inside the ceiling. You then phone your dear plasterer and beg him to come round urgently to patch up the hole you’ve just cut in the ceiling he just plastered, beautifully. That’s what you do. And that’s what I did. Thankfully our plasterer could come round the next day and did a fantastic job of filling in the hole I’d made. So much so you’d never know it was there.
Then the painter started. While he was undercoating we were choosing colours. Too strong. Too dark. Too yellow. Hmmmm. Ok let’s have that one, it’s nice a clean and fresh but not too white. I came home one night and said “wow, he’s finished the undercoat then. When is he putting the colour on?”. “He has put the colour on” stated my wife. Oh. So the colour we’d chosen was so fresh that in fact it was almost white. Ooops. Oh well, we’d just paid the guy £600 so I wasn’t going to paint over it!
After a few more tweaks, tubs of filler and many other annoyingly fiddly tasks later, the kitchen was delivered. Being Ikea, it was flat packed. Great. I love flat pack (really, I do, I find it so therapeutic). Then I slipped a disc in my back. Bollocks. That’s exactly what I need when I’m about to start humphing big wooden cabinets about.
In stepped wonder wife. The woman who had never in her life built anything from flat pack. After a few guided sessions of how to read Ikea instructions without screaming and how to avoid the typical first time flat-packer mistakes, she was off and building cabinets in minutes. Very impressive I must say.
So every Wednesday, while her parents played with Olivia, my wife built cabinets and fitted them to the wall (not the high cabinets though – she’s not *that* strong!). With the help of a joiner, we got the rest in and then the moment of truth – the worktop. The wooden worktop that we had been oiling every night for about a week. It went in perfectly and looked exactly as we’d hoped it would.
So that’s us done yes? Splashback? Hmm? Pardon? Oh balls. We need to tile don’t we? We’d better choose some tiles then yes? Ok. Square? Rectangular? White? Cream? Red? RED? Are you serious? That’s how it went. Then we stumbled across a tile we both saw, looked at each other and said “you think? Should we? Yeahh! Let’s try it”.
A week later, a few lessons in tiling and grouting and we now have what really is our completed kitchen. Without further ado I present to you our new, finished (minus the bit of floor that needs sanded) family kitchen.
Through The Looking Glass
So there you have it. Our finished kitchen. I hope you like it. We love it. It’s not what we set out to do, it’s not what we originally ordered, but it’s beautiful, it’s practical and we did it. Well, most of it at least. We have learned a huge amount about ourselves, each other, our family, what matter and what doesn’t. It has torn down relationships that now need rebuilt. It has strengthened others. It has also enlightened us to microwave rice. Where have you been all our lives.
Would I do it again? Ask me in a few years 
Footnote: if you are at all interested in how much all this cost, here you go.
Ikea kitchen units, under cabinet led lights and worktop: approx £1700 + £100 delivery due to volume of items
New oven: £350
Induction hob: £400
Extractor hood: £180
Plastering: £550 including utility room
Painting: £600
Back door: £900
Tiles: £70 including adhesive and grout
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Tags: Construction and Maintenance, Drywall, family, flat pack, ikea kitchens, Kitchen, Kitchen renovation, kitchens, new ceiling
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