The Everybody is Doing a Kitchen Thread

@cozey Is that Jamie Johnson art you have up on the wall there!??

good spot. picked it up cheap when he did a studio clear out a couple of years ago

Ah nice, I'm pals with Jamie in real life. Do you know each other?

I also got one of his paintings at a very generous mates rates during the same studio clear out a couple years ago when we moved out of Glasgow to a house.

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lovely. my wee brother knows him I think but I only know him from ig. he's local to me too, I think. sometimes see him skating at the bandstand in QP

Ah my online stalking made me think you where in Edinburgh, Jamie live around QP.

Critique my choices:
Sink
Tap

850£ tap... has velocio stolen your login details

Can be purchased for half that via google, but still expensive electric tap

Yeah, tap was £403

I have this tap.

It is excellent.

Best thing that came with this proper Jekyll and Hyde house we bought.

We get our keys next Wednesday and there is a fuck ton of stuff to do. The current kitchen is usable, but looks a bit shit. We will likely replace it, or maybe even extend (the kitchen is currently in the existing extension which only covers half the width of the house, we may "complete" the extension in future).

Either way, how to people plan kitchens? I know there are all sorts of online tools from the different suppliers, but I have zero creativity and imagination when it comes to this sort of thing. I have no patience for mood boards and the like. Is there a way to just get someone else to do it without the interior designer/architect tax?

Sink looks fine... it's a sink, hard to argue against.

Tap looks great too... though it takes a battery for the touch logic? I personally chose not to go for intelligent taps, etc... a sole mixer lever that does the heat and flow in one (as per that tap) means I don't see the point of the touch logic. What happens when the battery is dead? Is there a non-touch activated version of the tap? If so... this would be excellent.

This is what I'm working with, behind the camera (inside, not in the garden) there is a hallway/utility room for fridge and laundry.

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We used a small local company to buy our kitchen from, it wasn't an expensive kitchen at all (less than £10k!) and as part of that they sent out someone to go through plans with us on site, and make recommendations as to where things should go etc. and guide us on cupboard types etc. we found it useful. I don't think I would trust it so much from a big place but from a small local one you might get lucky.

I think you just use the handle like a normal tap. The touch thing does a 60 sec burst of water for when you have raw chicken on your hands or whatever.

What room is behind the double doors? Obviously you will lose light in there, so I would be considering a nice big roof light above if you extended across. Anything important in the little lean to? gas meter etc?

For simplicity Ikea have a kitchen designer app.
All you need to remember is where you're DW(/WM/TD) cooker, sink and fridge are going to live and work to the principle that the last three should form a nice small triangle, you want to add as much worktop space as you possibly can and go from there.

Double doors lead to dining room. There is a wall between the dining room and "utility" that apparently used to be an arch. That will likely get fucked through pretty quickly (some of the plaster board has already been caved in by boisterous teenagers, so we know it isn't load bearing). Lean to is just garden tool storage on the outside, there is a separate cupboard on the inside that houses the boiler and some other crap.

https://www.yopa.co.uk/properties/details/191242

If we do extend, we'd want big fuck off doors and roof lights for just that reason. But that might be a 4 or 5 year away thing.

I would also add, it is really useful to live in a space for a while before you change it, it was really hard for us as we had to put a kitchen in where none had been before, now we have lived with it for a couple of years there are a few minor annoyances which I would like to change, but would take a lot to fix, so I am stuck with them for a good few years yet.

how do people plan kitchens?

I started with a printout of the house floor plan blown up so that the kitchen was a side of A4... printed multiple copies, and then drew on it.

Smarter maybe would've been to cut out bits of card for different things and move them around.

Anyhow... I spent all the time trying to think about what annoys me about the current kitchen, how I'd prefer it. How it would work with 1 person cooking, and with 2 people cooking, etc.

Does the cooking area (near hob) block access to dishwasher?
Is there space to chop things and also space to place pots?
Is the space around the sink cramped or good enough for 2 people chopping veg?
Can I quickly access the fridge from the chopping area?
Can I with minimum effort get things from the chopping area to the cooking area?
Can I easily get from the cooking area to the sink?

To wax lyrical, I considered the kitchen a stage for a dance, and the act of cooking/baking to be a single person dance or a complex two person choreography... and I tried to think of how the stage would work to allow different dances to be performed. The output of this is the general layout.

Afterwards, for materials and colours, I came up with a theme... this was of a British old forest, and this is the stage... earthy, volcanic stone, dark woods, lush mossy green.

I mean... you could just visit Ikea and use their service to say "sink should go there".

it is really useful to live in a space for a while before you change it

This is probably the most likely thing to happen, just getting restless the closer it gets to completion day.

Most of this.

Also - can you have one person prepping and one person tidying at the same time.

Add making a cup of tea / drinks into the mix as well.

Where is your toddler going to sit while you / they are making them food making.

At it's most basic, you need to look at the path between prep area, sink, hob & fridge. Is it unimpeded, and can more than one person be there at the same time.

I think you just use the handle like a normal tap. The touch thing does a 60 sec burst of water for when you have raw chicken on your hands or whatever.

I'd definitely go for no smarts.

Electronics and a battery, in a tap... the kitchen will massively outlive the life of those things.

The tap is gorgeous, I'd just opt for a non-touch activated one.

Hi all, got some wild kitchen envy going on so probably a good place to ask for advice...

Looking for some inspiration to give mine a freshen up - don't have the funds to rip everything out & start again so I need to work with what's there, it's a big ol' box on the back of the house, faces south & has lovely 90's Ikea cabinets with those delightful 45 degree angled edges, random compartments for bottles everywhere & those lovely little railings on the shelves.

Can't even remember what colour the walls were when we moved in, but these were promptly painted the shade they are now - tiles were similarly unpleasant so I went over those quickly with tile paint which has stood up pretty well, basically when we moved in, we spent a weekend painting it then put it to the back of the list. Looking back, we should have probably painted the cabinets green & left the walls white but that's where we are now.

I want to get rid of the lowered ceiling & stick some windows in there at some point but that's a job for a later date, need some clever ideas to change it up a bit for now - cabinet doors are actually in pretty good shape & they're solid (the washing machine needs the door mountings adjusted, there's a door to cover it) i've partially sanded & oiled the previously varnished worktops which have come up nicely but it's hard to see where to change things as i'm staring at it every day & have almost become immune to the annoying bits.

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My kitchen design is pretty crap TBH. I need the storage space so almost all of the worktop has cupboards above it. Might not be the best for extensive food prep.

My plan is to get the cupboards tight to the ceiling and just live with it until we knock it all down in 3 years and do the extension.