Quick Fixes In The Kitchen

When undertaking a long-term renovation, you need to find the right balance between spending time painstakingly stripping back, plastering, sanding and painting each room in turn, while also making time for some quick fixes to make life in your delightful burgundy, mustard and jade painted house slightly less eye-wateringly hideous in the short-term.

As mentioned in earlier posts, we don't really have a kitchen. The plan is to create a big old extension housing a brand new kitchen-diner plus family room and playroom - but building work won't begin until at least 2014 (one of the big tasks on the list for 2013 is to hire an architect, get the plans drawn up and approved, and get a builder booked in). In the meantime, we're stuck trying to prepare three meals a day in a room that looks like this:

Or rather, it looked like that until we painted the woodwork white and the ceiling blue, and hung some of our favourite black and white family photos on the wall. It only took an afternoon, but it went some way to reducing the eyeball bleed every time we entered the room.

We also replaced the two ancient taps with a modern mixer tap that has been worth every penny of the £15 we paid for it on eBay.

And we have FINALLY unpacked the glasses and china that had been boxed up in the basement since we moved in nearly a year ago. The kitchen boasts a majestic two useable cupboards so we had nowhere to unpack our crockery into - that is, until we realised our 5 x 5 Ikea Expedit unit would *just* about squeeze into the gap between the fridge and the weird green cupboard in the dining room, which meant we could finally find out which of our kitchen items had been packed in the boxes labelled by our movers as "Nice Glass" and "Fancy Glass" (our lovely Heals champagne coupes and my Grandma's crystal glasses, respectively, as it turned out).

Behold:

I kind of feel like I should apologise for how bad this picture is, but hey, I have two kids, two dogs, and about a million rooms left to renovate so any free time I have which could be used to figure out how to white balance - well, I'm pretty much using that time to sleep.

Happy New Year! I hope 2013 brings you peace, health, prosperity - and in our case, a bedroom that's no longer mustard and burgundy. Here's hoping!