Kitchen!

So, finally, pictures of the kitchen.

The backstory, if you've missed it, was that we were planning on ripping out our kitchen and starting again, but then the husband lost his job and we reconsidered, and decided to spend much less on buying new storage baskets, fixing broken cabinets, getting an electrician in to fix certain lights and replace others, and painting the doors, walls and tiles.

We'd done everything bar the painting in the previous few weeks, so, after watching bits of the royal wedding despite ourselves, we got to it with the rest of the long weekend.

We started with the walls with one coat emulsion in 'vanilla', and then did the tiles with special tile paint which only came in three colours - we went for the blue one. Then the units were painted with white gloss paint desired for the purpose, which we can still smell, a week later. The Husband spray painted all the handles black.

We split the painting work over two days - long drying times between coats for the tile and cabinet paints made this the most practical way of doing it. On top of this, there was probably half a day's work scraping out sealant and cleaning down before, and a similar amount putting the sealant back in and attempting to remove paint from where it had splashed after things had dried.

Then the paint needed a couple of days to harden before it could be exposed to moisture/steam, which meant cooking was severely limited for a couple of days more.

Most of the paint was easy enough to work with - the gloss on the cabinets being particularly satisfying. The tile paint, however, was evil - so thick it was impossible not to leave brush strokes, and yet still prone to dribble. The finish looks great from a distance, but if you're painting tiles, I'd suggest only doing it if you absolutely hate the tiles you have, like we did.
The handles look a bit retro but were in too bad a state to be left as they were, and we didn't want to spend the extra money on new ones.

All in all, I'd say we spent about £450 - £150 on paint and brushes, £180 on the electrician, and the rest on the storage baskets. We'd have spent at least six times that on a new kitchen, and I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with the result.

There's one more exciting part of the kitchen project to come, when a new bin arrives in a couple of weeks. However, that's probably too boring to blog about!