I recently moved to a 25-year-old town house in Ipswich, Suffolk, and it gave me the chance to remodel the 3m x 4m kitchen. I spent a lot of time thinking about the design, and if my experience is helpful, well, you’re more than welcome to it.
Scroll down to the very bottom for the video summarising the whole project.
What we started with
Here’s the kitchen as it looked when I moved in. It was largely as fitted by the original house builders, and had been well looked-after, but was showing signs of irreparable wear. There’s a bay window on the wall behind the camera.
If the kitchen’s age wasn’t enough reason on its own to replace it, the rustic, twee style didn’t suit what I wanted to do with the house at all. And as I quickly discovered, a third factor came into play: kitchens have moved on a lot in the last 30 years, and we could introduce a lot of improvements. So it was time to settle down to some research.
Time well spent online
My first realisation was that you need to think about what you want before talking to any kitchen design or fitting companies. Many of them (including the DIY stores) offer free design services, and it’d be crazy not to use those – but you must go along to see them already having a good idea of what you want. Otherwise, they’ll just throw together some random ideas, and the opportunity to use their experience will be wasted.
Hitting the internet, I read a lot of articles and watched a lot of videos. Michael Reeve’s “Kitchinsider” and its YouTube channel may be all most people need to get their thoughts in order. Mark Tobin Kitchen Design, based in Canada, is another great source of ideas.
The Main Considerations
My second tip is to outline the important factors to consider. After all my reading and viewing, I decided to tackle each of the following, in order of importance:
- Functionality
- Layout
- General styling
- Maintainability
- Colours and Finish
When I eventually went to two kitchen designers, it was so useful to have my thoughts in order on all these points. I’m sure other people will list different considerations, with different priorities, but that’s the point of the exercise. One designer said he rarely had a customer to whom colours and finish were so relatively unimportant!
Functionality
An easy list, but a necessary exercise. My requirements for what the kitchen should do were straightforward enough that they could be considered non-negotiable: the essentials (oven, hob, sink, reasonable worktop space) and the niceties (extractor, dishwasher, fridge-freezer, boiling water tap, good lighting and plenty of power points). I also have a preference for drawers over cupboards wherever possible, for accessibility.
Layout
Again, pretty easy, but still important to think about. For example, I no longer wanted any cupboards immediately to the left of the door, as you walk into them on entering the kitchen. I read all about the ‘kitchen triangle‘ but didn’t consider it relevant in a simple, small kitchen like this. Similarly, the size of the space meant that an island or a peninsula was not an idea we’d be incorporating here. I learned about the problems of corner units, and realised I did not want to be reliant on that space; as a result, to my surprise, the kitchen designer and I eventually settled on using just two sides of the space for cupboards and worktop, rather than the three sides in the existing kitchen.
General styling
The overall aesthetic of the kitchen was important to me – more so than the colours and finish. I wanted a modern, warm, welcoming feel, but there were more fundamental considerations. The space had unusually high ceilings, and I wanted the lines of the units to be as horizontal as possible, to sweep around the room without breaks. I’m firmly of the opinion that vertical lines are more austere, and wanted to avoid them. ‘Landscape’ rather than ‘portrait’ seems to me to give a much happier vibe; to illustrate this, I drew up the sketch below for the sort of thing I envisaged:
I considered having separate fridge and freezer units, both under the worktop, just to avoid the verticality of a tall unit. However, I was convinced by other people that for access reasons, a combined fridge-freezer was a better option and that I should compromise on this one. Another good discovery was that an extractor can be hidden inside a cabinet above the hob, keeping the horizontal sweep around the room. I’m not sure why it’s become standard practice to make such a ‘feature’ of the extractor, one of the most mundane components of a modern kitchen.
Maintainability
This was something that struck me once I started looking through kitchen catalogues. Keeping easy maintenance in mind seemed really important to me. So many designs looked like they’d be tricky to keep clean, and as a consequence the kitchen would start to look old before its time. I wanted to keep the ‘new kitchen feel’ as long as possible, as well as make my life easier. To some extent, this requirement complemented the modern style that I was after, with clean lines and minimal decoration, although I could see that there are also plenty of contemporary kitchen designs that don’t give much consideration to whoever has to clean them. Too many ridges, grooves and slots! Could we reduce or eliminate these? Then there was the problem of tiling, which I always think starts to look tatty very quickly. I wondered if we could avoid tiles completely – and it turned out that we could!
Colours and finish
One kitchen designer told me that when some customers come in, colours and finishes are the only thing they’ve thought about. To me, these are well down the list of priorities. While I had no idea what finishes were available or advisable, I got together some thoughts, while bearing in mind the general styling concepts I’d had. The secret to working out what you want seemed to be to look at as many different kitchens as possible, and websites like Houzz were great resources. Oddly, some of the poorly-slung-together ‘kitchen design ideas’ videos on YouTube proved useful; these slideshows of pictures were very boring, but occasionally something attractive came up that I could screenshot. The styling which caught my eye was generally called ‘warm minimalist‘, and it gave me a sound basis to select some colours and finishes.
Drawing up plans
As mentioned, most kitchen design and installation companies, as well as many DIY stores, offer a free design service. I’d question why anyone wouldn’t take advantage of these. Most of them have access to professional 3D computer-aided design systems which will leave you walking away with some nice visualisation prints after maybe just an hour’s chat with the designer. Some will come round and measure up first, but it can save time and effort if you can provide your own accurate dimensional drawings of the space for them.
I chose one DIY store and one specialist kitchen fitter to begin with. This turned out to be enough, as my chats with them made me realise that there were limited design options for my kitchen, and that others weren’t likely to come up with anything radically different. Also, they came up with similar costings, which were around my budget, and I suspected that although there might probably be higher- and lower-end kitchens available, I’d found my level.
Getting the layout right
It took me several iterations with the designer just to finalise the layout of the kitchen, before we could even think about the finishes, colours, worktops, sinks and appliances. We got there however, and below is what we came up with eventually. The design turned out to be remarkably similar to the final kitchen!
Moving on to the finishes
It’s really hard to visualise what the finishes on all the elements might look like in conjunction with each other. The computer model is helpful, but I found the best way was to build lots of mini-kitchens out of sample blocks in the store. Obviously the colours and patterns need to complement each other, but with five different components (floor, lower cabinets, worktop, splashback/wall and wall cupboards), it made sense to make at least a couple similar or identical. The most obvious pairing would be to match the two levels of cabinets, but I wanted these to be different – darker (wood) under the worktop, and lighter at the high level. So I decided to approximately match the flooring and the worktop, as these were on the same (horizontal) plane.
A big decision was to choose a coloured glass wall to act as a splashback, both for maintainability and for good looks. This could have been subdued, like a wall, but I decided to go for a reflective feature colour.
The chosen worktop was quartz, which seemed to offer the best combination of quality, maintainability and price. On advice, I chose a fairly low-key marbled effect which would be enough to hide blemishes while avoiding a loud pattern, which I didn’t like. Then, after some time with catalogues from a local a flooring company, I found some Amtico LV tiles which gave a pretty similar effect.
All this meant that I still had four contrasting finishes in the kitchen, but I believed (and hoped!) they’d work well enough with each other.
Wood planes
Here’s an interesting aside. Remember that I wanted to keep the lines of the kitchen as horizontal as possible? In opting for a wood finish for the under-worktop cabinets and fridge-freezer, I was presented with a mystery. From all the manufacturers I looked at, the ‘landscape’-oriented cabinet fascias, including drawers, had a horizontal grain to the wood; but the ‘portrait’-oriented fascias, including the fridge-freezer, had a vertical grain. I just didn’t like this unsightly clash. Could I have a horizontal grain everywhere?
“It’s just not what’s offered”, I was told.
I did some research online and found an article from an upmarket supplier which explained that with solid-wood cabinets, pieces are cut so that the grain runs along the longer length, to improve flatness and minimise bowing, which is why adjacent fascias will have grains at 90 degrees to each other. Interesting, and makes sense. But with printed finishes like the one I’d chosen, there doesn’t seem much need to copy that technique. So I got my helpful designer to ask the manufacturers (Crown Imperial) if they could provide all of the fascias with the artificial grain print running horizontally. And they could, although apparently it was an unusual request. Sorted!
Considering appliances
In all the frenzy of ordering cabinets, taps, sinks and worktops, it’s easy to not spend enough time on appliances. I briefly discussed the sort of oven and hob I wanted with the kitchen designers, but that was all. When the quotes came for the entire kitchen, specific models had been included in the multi-page document, without further discussion. Now, normally before any domestic appliance purchase, many of us spend hours researching the best model. But it seems that many people just say “whatever” at this point. That would be a mistake. It’s important to take a deep breath and make sure the cooker, hob, extractor, dishwasher and anything else is exactly the one you’d buy if you weren’t having the kitchen refitted.
The kitchen fit-out
In the end, I opted to go with specialist kitchen suppliers KBB (East Anglia) Ltd who are very local to me. Their designer came over as reassuringly experienced, and they had a more than adequate selection of mid-range kitchens available. A whole range of tradespeople are needed for a kitchen installation, including the fitters, a plumber, a plasterer, an electrician and a floor installer. KBB offered to co-ordinate most of these, but I had to organise my own flooring and I opted to use my own electrician. I’d also decided to use a separate lighting supplier as part of a housewide upgrade. So there was a bit of project management required!
After a couple of weeks of planning, and ordering the components, I moved all my essential kitchen items into a makeshift space in the utility room, and we were ready to go.
Day 1: Strip out the old kitchen
KBB’s fitters arrived nice and early, and had the old kitchen out (and into a skip they provided) in just a few hours. They also organised a plumber to cap off the gas and water pipes for now. Here’s the before and after!
Days 2/3: Lighting and electrical work
I’m pretty obsessed with getting lighting right, to the extent that I decided to use a local specialist, Joseph Read Lighting. The more I researched lighting, the more I realised that it’s worth calling in some experience for the positioning, and it’s worth buying professional quality fittings. Expensive, yes – but not so significant when placed within the overall project budget.
Here’s what the kitchen looked like after two days’ work by the electrician. The previous ‘grid’ of cheap downlights was replaced by carefully positioned task lights (you can see the old filled-in holes on their symmetrical grid). Wiring for a pendant light was added, to go above the seating area. And we decided on having extra double sockets (6 above the worktop in all), moved higher by 10–15cm.
Days 4/5/6: Plastering, preparing for flooring and some initial decorating
Continuing the preparation work, in came the wall and ceiling plastering guys…
…followed the next day by the flooring guys, who wanted to get down a layer of latex across the whole floor. You can see the plaster already well down the path to being dry…
…and finally, the decorator popped in to do the ceiling, while there was nothing to splash paint on. He also took the chance to put a base coat on the left-hand wall…
Day 7: Moving in the units
KBB’s fitters returned, with a large van full of boxes, and spent the day unwrapping them, positioning them, and and screwing them all into place. The good news is that it all fitted.
Days 8/9: Finishing the units
Our first genuine problem! If you were paying attention above, you’d remember that I’d asked for the ‘wood grain’ finish on the units to be horizontal. And it was supplied as… vertical. Everywhere. It turned out that this wasn’t the kitchen fitting company’s fault – they’d ascertained that my request was possible, and ordered accordingly. But someone at the factory decided that they must have got things the wrong way around. I still don’t understand why vertical is the default. So they offered to resupply. As this would take two weeks, the fitters said they’d install the ‘wrong’ doors for now. They also put in the oven and dishwasher.
Despite the cabinet problem, things were starting to look really nice, as you can see.
Days 10/11: A floor, a worktop …and some lights
A meticulous guy arrived from Eric Dines Carpets and Flooring to lay the Amtico tiles, and the guys from the stonemasons brought the carefully-measured worktop, which fitted with not a millimetre to spare. It was tight!
Finally, the electrician returned to fit the lights, and connect the oven, hob and dishwasher. The worktop lights had to remain just hanging until the kitchen fitters could return to finish the panels under the wall units …which in turn couldn’t be done until the splashback was fitted.
We also realised at this point that the two ceiling lights at the far end were too far back – they’d been aligned with the worktop edge, not remembering that the far end included protruding upper units. Notice the reflection on the ceiling around them. However, we decided we’d got away with it, and didn’t need to reposition them – thankfully.
Days 12/13: Splashback, plumbing and replacement fascias
And we’re almost done! After a week’s gap, the guys from Deco Glaze arrived with their two huge pieces of copper-coloured reflective glass, which fitted in beautifully. Then the plumbers came to install the boiling water tap, which – thanks to the rather minimalist styling of the kitchen in general – turned out to be much more of a focal point than expected. I felt that the decision to choose the frighteningly expensive gold finish tap had turned out to be a good one. Then the fitters returned for a final time, to put in the worktop lights, and to replace the cupboard fascias with the replacement ‘horizontal’ ones. Finally, the electrician put in some really nice sockets to match the rest of the kitchen: minimalist screwless ones, with a brass/gold finish.
Day 14: Paint Job
Richard the decorator came in to paint the two walls opposite the worktops, and finish off the skirting board. Then I put in the seating and table, and we’re finished. The whole kitchen refitting had taken 14 working days. This had been spread over four weeks, which was necessary because some things (like the splashback glass) couldn’t be done until other parts had been completed. Thanks for getting this far – I hope it’s given you some ideas of your own.
