The beginning of our kitchen revamp

As you all know, we've recently moved into our forever home and its definitely a project for us! The house itself is completely liveable but there's so much we want to change and improve to make it our own.

Our first job has been to update the kitchen, we're not going to replace and install a new kitchen any time soon so we're going to embrace the current kitchen and see what we can make of it.

The house was previously lived in by a family of 7! So as you can imagine, it's very well lived in and quite simply grubby. They left us a grey sofa in the kitchen which we have kept and you'll see it in lots of our pictures.

Here are some pictures of the kitchen as it was when we moved in...

The previous family were quite big fans of loud and colourful walls which isn't really our cup of tea... this was the feature wall in the dining area of the kitchen.

As well as changing the feature wall, we knew we were going to repaint the kitchen to freshen it up.





We've chosen to paint the walls in Valspar 'Clotted Cream' which can be mixed and purchased from B&Q.


This is the colour card in comparison to Dulux 'Timeless'












The first thing we wanted to do was change the feature wall in the dining area of our kitchen, we replaced the colourful floral paper with this;

Here you can find the wallpaper we used!-----

http://www.diy.com/departments/cream-gold-effect-grandeur-wallpaper/1478072_BQ.prd?New_WP_LF_Cream

I just love how clean and refreshing it looks! It's totally changed the feel of the kitchen and was great for £12 per roll.


We've also decided to change the door handles to update the look of the kitchen cupboards.

 

 

These handles are T bar in brushed nickel and were purchased from B&Q.

 

Another thing I really wasn't keen on was all the beech! The kitchen itself is pretty timeless but the beech trims on the units just made it feel old fashioned and cheap.

 

 

You can all probably agree it doesn't look great!





So here is a close up of some of the units.
We wanted to remove the beech trim that runs
along the top.






















It was pretty weird seeing it without the trim!
The trims just simply unscrewed so it literally was a 5 minute job.

 

 

Unfortunately we couldn't remove the beech trim that runs along the bottom of the units as they were put on with the tiles so it would ruin them and we're not looking into replacing the tiles... yet! We decided to paint the bottom trim to match the colour of the unit instead.

 

 

 

To do this we took a cupboard door into B&Q and had it scanned to get a colour match. We then had the colour mixed in Valspar mid sheen. We paid £15 for our tin.                                                                  

To paint the trim we firstly sanded them to take off the plasticy feel and make them rough. We then literally painted them giving them three coats and this was the result which I must say I'm very happy with!

 

So with the beech trims gone, we decided to paint the beech plinths sitting underneath the kitchen units. Again we did this the same way we'd painted the trims.

 

Once we'd painted the plinths, we added some LED strip lights underneath the cabinets. We bought 3m of strip lights from Screw Fix for £25 and attached them to the underneath of the units.

 

This quick, simple and relatively cheap update to our kitchen has really made a big difference. We're now only left with beech work tops and the kitchen just feels a lot more up to date. We've still got a long way to go with the kitchen including wooden blinds, boxing in ugly fuse boxes and changing the tiles but I feel so much better about it!

 

Here is our updated kitchen during the day

 

 

 

 

Here is our updated kitchen at night

 

 

Our dining area of the kitchen is looking good, I'm very happy with it!

 

 

As the kitchen updates keep on happening, I will keep you all updated. If anyone has any suggestions as to what tiles you would add to the kitchen, let me know! :)

 

Thank you for reading

 

Doll xoxo