Heart of the Home

It was a tough decision.

My bedroom has my bed in it. But my kitchen is just gorge.

Final decision? I think the kitchen has to be my favourite room in our home. I spend a lot of time in it cooking, baking, cleaning, doing laundry (and sometimes just hanging out in it and dancing around with the kids – speakers and Spotify are all you need). I totally agree when people say that the kitchen is the heart of the home.

But, I have definitely not always had such feelings towards it.

I’ll take you back to October 2010, when we first moved in…

297 — check out the old skool electricity plug!

Yes, this is really what our kitchen looked like!

We were lucky to be in a position to buy a house but when you’ve got a certain budget (and you live in a popular area of Surrey), this is what you can get for your money. Our house was built in the 50’s and basically, the one previous owner it had, hadn’t done a lot to it since it was built.

We had a lot of weekends visiting home and DIY stores, picking things out and planning for our home. One of the first rooms that had to be done though, was the kitchen. It took about a week in total to have our new kitchen fitted and decorated but it was well worth the living like a student that week, with a fridge and a microwave on the living room floor and take aways galore!

Everything had to be cleared, walls had to be knocked down, a hatch to be covered over, new appliances to be bought and fitted, electrics and gas to be refitted and connected, plumbing to be plumbed, asbestos boards to be cleared, new windows to be fitted – the list goes on, it really was a bombsite.

But after the blood, sweat and tears, literally, I got my dream kitchen. I love how it turned out in terms of the decoration but especially happy that we could have a big American style fridge freezer, we could get rid of that lino and wallpaper and get a shiny new dishwasher. As much as I love to be in the new kitchen, I loathe washing up so this was a big bonus. We have recently tried Fairy Platinum dishwasher tablets in our lovely dishwasher and they are amazing. They really do exactly what they say they will – I would recommend them.