The Halfway Kitchen

There’s a point during a kitchen refit where you look at all the dust and disaster and think, what have we done. We’d torn out the old kitchen and what we were left with was an empty shell that needed more work than planned.

The room was far from square so we knew some work would need to be done to stud out a wall and get the basics in order. What we didn’t know was that we had damp in the back wall, that the electrics were a tangle from a nightmare and that some of the plumbing wasn’t as sound as we’d hoped. No matter how well you budget, there’ll always be something that you can’t see coming, like this…

Yes, that’s black mould, in our ceiling.

Luckily for us, this was also the point where we were handing the job over to the professionals. So long as I supplied an endless chain of coffee, things would get moving.

In the space of that week, we’d have a new window and door, a full rewire, the plumbing moved and a plastered room with a new ceiling height.

We hadn’t realised how bad the wiring was until we found an extension lead under a cabinet and that one of the old cabinet brackets was hung through a cable. The old wiring was like a spiderweb of diagonal lines across the room.

Although the rewire took up a lot of our budget, I knew it would be done right and we’d be much safer. You can see in the photo above that we’d actually lost about 30cm of ceiling height when the previous owners boarded it out. I desperately wanted to open it back up to full height because it felt so low compared to the rest of the house. What we actually did, after some convincing from my Dad, was lower it even more!   Let me show you why…

Remember that beam for the extension? Wouldn’t it look much higher, more modern and clean if the ceiling was just one level? Wouldn’t it already look a bajillion times better and brighter if the ceiling didn’t resemble a Swedish sauna? Yes, it would.

How about completely plastered with some base units assembled, wouldn’t that look even better?

It had taken a while to get to this point but we were finally ready to fit the new kitchen. From here on out it was about to change very quickly!

In this series:

Our new kitchen plans
The Kitchen Teardown
The Halfway Kitchen