kitchen before...

By far the biggest project we've undertaken in this house has been our kitchen!  When we moved in, we had a mish mash of cabinets, some tiled floor, some bare concrete, a cook top that slid around on the bench top, half a splash back... well the list goes on!  Anyway, here are some before photos so you can see for yourself! This is what the kitchen looked like when the house was on the market - bear in mind these are professional photos so it actually looks better and a lot bigger than it appeared in person (also it was open for inspection, so of course the previous owners obeyed the cardinal rule for selling your house - get rid of all clutter!)

And at a different angle taking in the back part of the house and back door:

But flattering photography aside, you can still see the bare gyprock, missing cornices and skirting, and the bare cement on part of the floor (there used to be a doorway there into the laundry which the previous owners blocked up) the green bench tops and yellow cupboards... nice!  Just above the fridge you can also see the servery window the previous owners cut out but didn't finish off, which afforded a magnificent view of the back of the fridge from the dining room!

I feel like I need to say, just to be fair to the previous owners, that they did not choose this decor (it was inherited) and they had started some great renovation work before they needed to sell - it was just very much mid-renovation.

In any case, we bought the house and moved in.  The kitchen didn't have a dishwasher so the very first thing we did was have one installed.  The second thing we did was getting a cabinet maker we knew of to put a door on the kitchen (since Alex was not quite 2 at that time).  We quickly discovered that the previous owners must have packed up their whole kitchen and lived on take away while the house was on the market, because there was next to no storage in the kitchen!  To remedy this (and because we knew we weren't keeping the kitchen, just putting in interim solutions until we did a full reno)  we hung some very ugly shelves in the corner on the wall (we found them in the garage), put in a plastic set of drawers and wooden shelving unit to tide us over.  So here is the chaos that was our kitchen after our family came to town!







In the photo below here you can see the top of the servery that the previous owners cut out which looked through to the dining room.... great idea in theory however there was nowhere else in the kitchen to put the fridge and freezer!

 

So we ended up with a view of the back of them when looking back towards the kitchen from the dining room.... tres chic, non?

We actually survived 5 long months with this makeshift kitchen before Kitchen Connection  came to transform it for us.  (We'd looked at a couple of other companies,  a local cabinet maker and even Ikea kitchens but in the end we liked the design and found it great that they would coordinate all the tradespeople to do the work at once, so less stress for us).

We decided we wanted to lose the wall with the servery in it and have a big long bench there - they were totally obliging.  We also didn't want a corner pantry, we wanted high cupboards along the back wall and then cupboards underneath.  On the left had side in the corner we put a 2 tier lazy susan.  On the right hand side in the corner we put a le mans (you can see it here if you scroll through the images).  On the bench top on the left hand side we wanted an appliance nook with a roller door.  We wanted the oven in the wall (rather than under bench), big slide out drawers in the pantry, and large drawers for our dishes also.  And they were able to incorporate it all - yippee!

So after signing our life away, emptying our bank account and a couple of days with no kitchen (that's really all it took - not long at all) we got our dream kitchen!  I've put the kitchen afters in a new post as it seems to take too long to load if I do it all together, so you'll have to read the next post to see the afters, hee hee hee!

Bye for now :)