£85,000! No that’s not how much we’re planning to spend on our kitchen, but that is what the nice man from Magnet once had a customer spend on a kitchen! Apparently before he joined Maget, he worked for a company specialising in bespoke kitchens, catering to the kitchen needs of London’s financial elite. The kitchen was not for someone famous – I was a bit disappointed as I was hoping for some juicy celeb gossip – but it was in fact for a London trader trying to spend his bonus.
“What on earth do you put in an £85,000 kitchen?” I asked Mr. Magnet. Well the long list included solid oak units, marble worktops and matching roman columns (money doesn’t buy you taste clearly) and a top of the range triangle (cooker, fridge and sink in case you didn’t know!). But even Mr. Magnet agreed that the law of diminishing returns applies to kitchens too, so there is a tipping point beyond which spending more money just isn’t going to get you anything better than the less well off Mr Jones down the road! That makes me feel so much better about our kitchen budget which needless to say falls massively short of the £85,000 mark.
So in terms of what we might be getting, well I have to wait until next Tuesday to see how Mr.Magnet suggests we fit out our new kitchen and what sort of triangle we might end up with! In the meantime I haven’t been able to resist mouching around the kitchens section of the house to home website.
There’s also a section on all these amazing storage options which are totally dangerous for me to be looking at. I have got total storage envy.
But I wonder if these pictures aren’t a little misleading. Don’t they give a false impression of what real life can be like? They’re the kitchen equivalent of fashion magazine photospreads! You know the ones like ‘what to wear to the office’ that have pictures of impossibly beautiful women with perfect figures wearing chic co-ordinated outfits leaning on a desk? They sort of sucker you in (momentarily of course!) to the fantasy that if you don an expensive pencil skirt and cashmere twinset, then life will be perfect! I get the same dreamy feeling when I look at these kitchen storage photos until I snap back to reality and remember that with two young boys and a husband who is positively averse to putting things away, my drawers are never going to look like this:
And would I want them to, really? Well maybe, but how much effort would it take to keep them like that! I think maybe I can find more fun ways to spend my life!
Anyway, after I stopped drolling over all these photos I started to look at the advice on kitchen layout. House to Home give lots of options depending on the shape of your kitchen and its well worth looking at if you are considering renovating your kitchen. It comes with advice to suit the shape of any kitchen, so for me that’s L-shape
Of course I am jumping the gun a bit. Before we can buy the kitchen we’ve got to have the building work done, the biggest part of which is joining up the outside utility room (which was more of a winery it seems for the previous owners) with the rest of the kitchen and then knocking through to the dining room so we have an L-shaped kitchen diner. It’s not as simple as it sounds given you have a fifteen inch drop down out of the kitchen to get to the utility room. This mean the floor of the utility room needs to be built up by about to meet the kitchen and the roof raised – otherwise only people 5 foot and below will be able to use the space! The good news is that because we’re using the existing footprint of the building, there’s no need for planning permission, we just have to get the building regulations people from the council to do a couple of site inspections! Easy peasy! Or not, time will tell!
Tags: design, DIY, kitchens, renovations