Howdens Kitchen Tour
Hello, everybody and welcome back to chooseoutdoorkitchens.com, i hope, you’re all doing well and keeping safe. Today’s article is a little bit different. You may have noticed that I’m in a different room, I’m currently in my kitchen, so i apologize if there’s a bit of an echo and we’re currently having our kitchen redone. So i thought i would show you the progress so far and we’ve actually chosen to get our kitchen from halden’s and we was originally going to go with a kitchen, fitter and but then my partner michael, got furloughed because of the lockdown.
So we thought why not? Give it a go ourselves and it’s been the hardest most stressful thing we’ve ever decided to do, but it saved us quite a bit of money, so it was worth it, but it was so much harder than we ever imagined. It would be. We literally just thought. Oh yeah take the old cabinets out, put the new cabinets in done, but it’s not like that at all, you’ve got to think of all the plumbing and the pipes and the gas, and all things like that. So it has been very tricky um.
So a bit of background, if you’re new to this article um, my name is Max. We bought a new build property almost two years ago, and but we didn’t choose anything that was in the house. It was already done when we reserved it. So we didn’t choose flooring, kitchens bathrooms tiles, anything like that. It was already done and we had a high gloss kitchen like a white gloss and i just found it was really high maintenance.
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I have two young children and there was constantly fingerprint marks on the cabinets. Like i would wipe it and then hours later, there’s fingerprints all over it again. So for us it was just very high maintenance and it just wasn’t working. So we thought we’d save up and get a new kitchen. We’ve decided to go with a gray, shaker style, like i said, from howden’s, we did get two different quotes to have the kitchen fitted and which were over a thousand pounds different in price.
So if you are looking at getting a kitchen fitted yourself, i would really recommend getting more than one quote, because i was quite surprised actually at the difference in the two quotes over a thousand pounds different. So i would definitely recommend that if you are getting a kitchen fitter but like i said, we’ve done it ourselves to save some money.
So I’m just gonna flip you around and i will walk you through. What we’ve done so far. Show you what it looks like and what our plans are to get it finished. Okay. So as we walk in from the hallway, we come to the like the dining area, section. First, to show you the kitchen as a whole. So this is where we’ve got our dining table.
We do need to get a new dining table, as you can see, it’s definitely past its best and we’re hoping to get maybe like a rustic kind of farmhouse style dining table, i’m not sure on the colored chairs. Yet because i don’t want to be too oh, that was the post yeah, not showing the color chairs yet because we don’t want it to be too gray in here, because we’ve got a gray kitchen. So I’m not sure what color we’re going to go for, but yeah definitely need to replace the table.
We’ll probably get a similar size table to fit six chairs round and on this back wall here we’re maybe gonna put a tv up there or clock or something like that. We’ve left, we left a space here and we used to have a cabinet there, but we’ve left that off because we thought we’d put some open shelve in there.
Some kind of nice, like wooden shelves up there with like a plant on a few accessories, just to make it a bit more interesting in the room. If you flip around this side, we’ve got this space here, excuse the old worktops, that’s what we used to have on it, and we’ve actually got someone to come to pick it up.
So we’ve just got it left in the kitchen for the moment, but i thought here: um we’ve got this space here and i might put two armchairs there with a little side table in the middle and that’s my plan for there and just need to see what Size chairs to get to make sure they fit um or maybe a two-seater sofa, but i don’t think we’re gonna have enough space, for that, i think maybe two chairs, like occasional chairs would be better um.
Ideally, i would like that radiator to be a long thin one along the wall, so we’d have more space, but that’s just money. We don’t need to spend so i’m just leaving the radiator as it is and we’ll just squeeze in what we can in that space. As you can see as well, we do also need to change the floor in and it comes in a bit further than that old kitchen did so we can now see the bare concrete, so that is something we will do in the future.
We’re not really in any rush to do it. It is literally that section of the kitchen that just doesn’t look too pretty, but it doesn’t matter too much. We are going to have some bar stools along there as well anyway, so that will cover it a bit but yeah.
That’s definitely something we’ll do for the future and, like i said, we’ve now got this big work top here, which is a breakfast bar which we’re going to have some bar stools here, we’ll probably have three here i think we’ll fit three in. I don’t think we’re going to fit four, so we’ll probably go with three, but that’s a nice extra space that we didn’t have before, because it was just a normal worktop before we didn’t have the overhang for the seating area.Sso that behind it would be nice For the kids to kind of sit up there and help me with the dinner or bake cakes, things like that, we have um started looking at paint samples.
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So this is egyptian cotton by dulux, but i’m not sure if it’s the one we’re going to go for. It’s a bit darker than i thought it was going to be so we might get something a bit lighter, so I’ve put it there as well next to the cupboard so yeah. I definitely think we need something a bit lighter, even though i love that color.
I don’t think it’s quite right for this room, so we’re still looking at paint options at the moment. So come around into the actual kitchen area and we’ve kept all our appliances. We had these already. There was no need to change them, so we’ve kept all of those, so we’ve got the grey, shaker style kitchen and it’s the fairfoot range in the color dove grey, and it’s just really nice and light and really opens up this space.
We’ve gone for brushed chrome, knobs and then the handles as well in brushed chrome, which i’m really happy with, and we’ve also got in this corner here these pull out drawers and i was really against so they come all the way out to show you there, so They come all the way out and i was really against getting these because i thought we would lose space because obviously they’re thinner than what a shelf would be um,
But i’m so glad the kitchen designer convinced me to get them because they’re really handy they go Right the way back into the cupboard and they go all the way to the space that you wouldn’t have been able to reach.
So actually you are using more space, so yeah, I’m really happy. We decided to go with those and i love how the corner cupboards open as well, because they have the two doors that open like so so you can get right into the cupboard. So we didn’t have that before. So that’s definitely handy uh. The sink we went for is a white composite sink um.
We were kind of torn between ceramic and composite and we went with composite because i was worried that the ceramic would get chipped. Obviously we have two young children and they might throw a bowl or something into the sink, and i was worried to get chipped so we went with this and actually I’m really happy.
We did no problems with it. So far, it’s supposed to be stain resistant and heat resistant so really pleased with that. So far, we’ve also got this really tall cabinet here which we didn’t have before. It was a lot smaller and we’ve actually put the microwave in here. We do need to sort the shelves out a bit because it’s a bit higgledy pickledy at the moment, but yeah we’ve put the microwave in here.
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So it’s out of the way and then with this cupboard down here, we plan on putting um like little hooks on either side and then having an area where the kids can hang like their lunchboxes and school bags, and things like that, because what we used to Do is we’d come in from school and they’ll just get thrown on the kitchen worktop or the dining table, but we’re hoping to create this little space to put all the school school stuff in for the children.
So yeah looking forward to getting that done, and hopefully that’ll work out quite well having somewhere to store all of that coming round here. This is into our utility room. As you can see, it is a bit of a mess. That’s where we’re storing all of the tools and off cuts and things at the moment so excuse the mess, but you’ll get an idea of what it’s going to look like. So our plan in here is maybe to have some shelves going across there on the wall.
Going across here and then up in this cupboard here, we’re probably going to just put some wicker baskets and things like that – maybe to put the pegs in and things like that out of the way so yeah it’s slowly coming together in there, i will just mention, As well that the kitchen we went for the furford one has got wood grain effect through the doors. I don’t know how well you can see it, but I’m really pleased with that.
I think it looks really nice with the wood grain going through it. So just spun you back around to show you from this angle, so there’s still a few bits we need to do, but it’s getting there obviously doing it ourselves, it’s taking a lot longer than it would have done if someone else was doing it and I’ll just Quickly talk about the worktops actually um.
We do need to stick something over this. We have something for it on the windowsill, but just haven’t got around to doing it. Yet so we’ve actually gone for a laminate worktop. I would have loved a quartz one, but the price difference was just crazy. I think i think the quote we had for courts was about three thousand. I can’t remember exactly now it might have been just under three thousand but um yeah.
So we’ve decided to go for laminate just because it was a lot cheaper, but actually I’m so glad we decided to go with the laminate, because it’s really beautiful we’ve gone for this. Marble effect one. So it’s got the grey running through it and then the upstand as well and they do do a backboard as well. I think in this laminate, if you wanted it across your whole wall.
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Obviously we do have the joins, because it’s laminate and not quartz. So we do have a few joins around the kitchen where it’s meeting, but to be honest, that really doesn’t bother me too much. So that is where we’re up to so far for the kitchen renovation, like i said we got it from howden’s. It was a really simple process.
We just sent them all our measurements and photos of the kitchen, and then we had a kitchen designer come out and talk through us our options and choices, and we actually managed to get ours in the sale as well. They do a sale around september, october time, so we had our kitchen designer come out back in august and then we held on until october before we actually ordered the kitchen. So we got the sale price.
If you do have any questions, please just leave them in the comment section down below and I’ll try and answer them the best. I can thank you so much for reading. I really hope you enjoyed this article.
If you did, please don’t forget to give it a thumbs up. I will do another kitchen update when it’s a bit more finished.Thank you so much for reading and I’ll see you all again soon.
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