Totsdiy Kitchen diner ideas

My kitchen is in des­per­ate need of a remodel. The “morn­ing room” side of the kitchen has a huge win­dow that faces our neigh­bours side door. We keep the cur­tains drawn all the time as we don’t want to see them coming/going and nei­ther do we want them to see into our kitchen.  It  has a 1930’s tiled fire­place and a 1970’s gas fire. Yes folks we won the style lot­tery when we bought this house. The kitchen part of the kitchen was last done in the early 1980’s from what I can gather. When we bought the house it had a hor­rid car­pet in the morn­ing room side and dirty torn lino in the kitchen side. We pulled those up imme­di­ately as they stunk to high heaven. So the floor in one side is bare wood floor– unfin­ished and dirty and in the kitchen it is cracked ter­ra­cotta tiles w/ indus­trial strength adhe­sive stuck to it. I’m not going to show pic­tures because I am too ashamed. When we bought the house we thought we’d live in it for a while before decid­ing what to do. We’ve been here a lit­tle over 2 years! Last Octo­ber just as we were get­ting peo­ple in to talk design and give us quotes Wal was noti­fied that his com­pany was going to be sold and he was pos­si­bly going to be made redun­dant. We have lived under that threat for 12 month.  So as you can imag­ine we put a hold on all major remod­ling plans– and you can’t get more major than a kitchen remodel!  So when the Tots100 and Ratedpeople.com announced their com­pe­ti­tion I started dream­ing again.  Below are the key items I would love for my kitchen diner.

our orig­i­nal plan was to knock through the dou­ble sided fire­place that the kitchen and din­ning room share… that was until we got a quote for £20k and then we decided to keep it. So our idea is to knock through on either side of the fire­place. It won’t give us the open airy feel of a true din­ner kitchen but I think it will still work.  Under the big win­dow I men­tioned before would go that lovely win­dow seat w/ some shut­ters for a lit­tle pri­vacy.  On the back wall of the morn­ing room where we have a empty wall I would put a big pantry until.  The break­fast bar would replace the one that is cur­rently there. I would move it a bit fur­ther into the morn­ing room and make it a bit larger. This would help inte­grate the morn­ing room and kitchen and make it feel a bit more like one room. Some fun things I’d like to add to the space is colour­ful chairs and I love the idea of a chalk­board wall. We’ve kicked around the idea of paint­ing the fire­place w/ chalk­board paint. I also like the idea of putting a “skin” around the chim­ney breast where we could add those drink cylin­ders like the pic­ture above. The skin would then be painted w/ chalk­board paint. The kitchen has had 2 exten­sions and no one ever both­ered to make sure the floor was level.  We’d need a way to fix that, self lev­el­ling con­crete? The floor in the kitchen would then be a lam­i­nate floor­ing, I like the type that looks like slate. Cheap, easy to clean and things won’t shat­ter into a gazil­lion pieces when they fall on the floor. In the morn­ing room and din­ing areas we’d sand and var­nish the exist­ing floor.