Hiphopsideproject

We had a good week in the house last week and got a tonne of work done on the kitchen. Being ikea flat pack, Adam and I spent some evenings when we got back from hong kong assembling all the cabinets, ready to be put in the kitchen later on. The cabinets on the wall were put in last weekend/friday of last week, and all the other cabinets were arranged into their rightful places. This weekend Adam and his dad put the tall cabinets into place and secured them. Everything is slowly starting to come together, and a few of our worries about the space/layout have been resolved.

Here you can see the wall cabinets, all the cabinets are from the ikea faktum range (and will eventually have applad door fronts). We’ve gone for a simple corner arrangment, with a large double cupboard for crockery and mugs, two slim shelving cupboards and a corner shelving cupboard. I must say that the ikea corner cupboards are a really great use of what can sometimes be pretty dead space! All our wall cupboards are the tallest ones, meaning we have minimal gap above them (which we may even close off eventually anyway). Reasoning behind this…. have you ever checked the top of your kitchen cupboards and found the grease? yeah… exactly.

Again, we’ve taken care to use the space the best we can, making use of the corners that would otherwise be a pathetic ether. The corner cupboard here will have a fancy single concertina style door that pulls open to reveal a carousel shelving unit. The larger cabinet on the right will have the oversized hob on top of it, one dead drawer just below that, and then two other drawers. There’s also a smaller drawer unit just out of view. The gap where all the wires currently sit will be the spot for our washing machine, again with a smaller drawer cabinet to the left of it.

Here’s where our kitchen get s a bit strange. Due to the length of the kitchen, and the annoying placement of a the pantry door, we’ve had to put our cooker quite a distance away from the hob. It’s going to live in that central wall unit, but! it’s not so weird because we have a kitchen trolley, so any hot food will be put on that. You’ll see.

Speaking of the oven…

And here’s the hood. This should be able to go up this week, too.

One of the greatest things about buying a house set for refurbishment is the ability to put your own mark on the rooms (not like a cat, or owt). The kitchen has become one of the rooms where were really went a bit wild with stuff, because we could. It’s been completely redesigned to our own choices and has been the most fun thing in the world :D

As you already know, our kitchen is coming from ikea. Our choice of ikea was mainly down to cost, but also the ability to fit the kitchen yourself and at your leisure. We also like that we will be able to accessorise and add to the units if/when we want, because ikea stuff all fits together!

I took on the challenge of designing our kitchen one weekend using the Ikea home planner, which is a super nifty drag-and-drop tool that you can download to any windows PC. If you’re a 100% mac user you can head to your local ikea and play with it in their kitchen section, too.