My New Kitchen

Firstly, sorry for my complete lack of posts during August. It's been a long, hard, busy, stressful month.

Secondly, as we are nearing the point where we should be actually moving into our new home, I thought I'd share my new baking space with you!

On the 31st July, James and I got the keys to our mid-terrace home, built in 1901.

It doesn't look like much from the front, but inside it's like stepping into the Tardis. It's been extended, so the rooms are big and airy, but still feel cosy at the same time. Our house-buying experience has not been the easiest, quickest, or most straight forward (it took six months from putting an offer on the house to getting the keys) but I'm so happy to be able to say that, finally, James and I are homeowners!

Once things are a little more up together, I would like to do some before and after photos. We've done a huge amount of work to the living space; we've replace the ceiling in the living room; moved the porch wall to accommodate our sofa; removed doors/door frames; taken out two fireplaces and opened up a third one; and moved a radiator in the master bedroom. At the moment though, the house still looks like a bit of a building site and we haven't actually moved in. There are two rooms that we aren't touching for the moment though - the bathroom, and the kitchen. We would like to replace the kitchen in time, but for now we're keeping it as it is. These photos were taken from the estate agents website (Allen Residential) and so show all the previous owners' belongings in it, but just look at the space!

While we were house hunting, a decent sized kitchen, or the possibility of extending to make a big kitchen, was top of the list of criteria. James loves cooking, and I love baking so it was important to us to have the space to be able to do this in. So, here is our new kitchen!

 

 

Ok, so other than the size, there are a lot of things that I really don't like about it. I really don't like the cupboards - they're too busy, and the spaces inside most of them is actually quite small where they've put lots of shelves inside. Trying to find places to stand things like cereal boxes and bottles of vinegar, oil, sauces etc is quite hard! I also don't like the sink; it's quite narrow and can only just fit a standard sized dinner plate in it, so I'm not expecting our crockery to last long where I keep knocking the edges on the rim of the sink. And lastly, the oven. It's awful. At my Mum's, we were baking and cooking on a duel-fuel Rangemaster with two fan ovens, a grill and five hob rings. The oven in our new kitchen is all electric, with 4 hob rings and one oven/grill that's barely big enough for two 9" cake tins. I don't know how the previous owners ever managed to cook a meal for a family of five in it! We do have plans to turn this into a sleeker, more practical and usable kitchen, and replace the cooker for something similar to the one I was using at my Mum's, but it's going to take us a while to save up for it. For the foreseeable future, this will be where I will be baking cookies and cakes from now on.