Extreme Makeover – Kitchen Edition – Before

The kitchen is the heart of many homes. Here a little bit more so because I work in the kitchen most days testing recipes. Or at least I did up until Hallowe’en last year. Just after the day itself I managed to fall and break my wrist so cooking was put on hold for a while. Then two weeks into my cooking hiatus the grill and oven packed it in. The washing machine and dishwasher were also on their last legs so we limped them along until just after Christmas.

Thanks to a combination of some savings and a generous gift we have been able to completely renovate the kitchen in a bit of an extreme makeover. I always said that when things got better one of the first things we’d do would be to invest in the house and this is the start of the home improvements. This is an old image from a few years ago – where I filtered the bejeepers out of it to make it look a bit nice. Still this is the kitchen that I work in to feed our family.

The old kitchen didn’t work for me for a number of reasons:

The kitchen was a simple galley and none of the appliances were built in. I hadn’t enough space for all the things I wanted to do in the kitchen and dirt accumulated under the washing machine.

I couldn’t get at one of the presses because of the way it aligned with the necessary dishwasher.

Counter space = what counter space? What you see here is all the space I had. I cook an awful lot from scratch, and consider I wrote a family cookbook in this kitchen, nevermind the fact that we grow our own food and there’s preserving to be done.

There just wasn’t enough storage for food, as well as delph and cooking implements, so I had moved all the food into a pantry (storage cupboard) in the living room. This was a pain for checking what I had in stock, and I’d have to shift from room to room each day to get what I needed.

The kitchen was brown and got grubby very easily. It dulled down the beautiful light in the room from the south facing bay window.

I’ve lived in 2 bed apartments with a bigger kitchen. I have no idea how or why the builders thought it was big enough for a family home.

This is the before post so keep an eye out in the next few days for the big reveal. It has been a long time coming!