Project Kitchen

The kitchen is the heart of the home, but ours is also a ‘multi-use’ space. As well as housing the stairs it is also home to the back and front doors. This means it is a well-used room, but it is always full of ‘stuff’. We come in, plonk down our bags, kick off our shoes, take off our coats and there it all stays. The post generally makes it no further than the table or worktop where piles have been known to mutate into Mega-piles that have come to scare me and could easily bury me alive.

Two years ago we designed and Ade built a custom made table that has been fantastic. It is not a small kitchen by any means, we have 17 cupboards and 6 drawers, but the stairs mean a normal width table wouldn’t fit. Our slim line, bar height table is perfect and we are so pleased with it.

This week has been project ‘kitchen’ week. Every cupboard has been emptied, cleaned, contents sorted and re-stacked. Numerous sacks of rubbish have been thrown out, the dining room is full of stuff to be sold at a vide grenier and there are ‘items-in-transit’ dotted around the house waiting to find new homes (including a box containing a pile of ‘stuff’). At the beginning of the week Ade was all for a trip to Bordeaux to buy some clever storage solutions from Ikea. Despite the thrill I get from a trip to Bordeaux I was convinced storage wasn’t our problem, organisation was and I was right! It is now looking great and I feel fantastic – a tidy kitchen has given me a clear mind and the motivation to move on and tackle the rest of the house. Who knows we may even get to grips with the dodgy plaster issues and hideous 1970’s brown and orange wallpaper on the kitchen/stairs wall. Watch this space.