The Most Beautiful Wooden Kitchen Inspiration I Could Find on Pinterest

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I’ve been planning the kitchen since the day we moved in almost two years ago now. Someone told me not to make any big changes until we had lived in the house for a year. At the time I thought I’d never be able to live without gutting it for a whole year, but after that year flew by and then another I realised I needed to start making some key decisions and maybe scale back some of my more lofty ambitions if I was going to ever have a kitchen I enjoyed being in.

Right now I have some pretty strong feelings about my kitchen. To be frank I hate everything about it. The red tiles mixed with the chipped black worktop. Warped and worn cupboard doors, dark, stained, broken floor tiles. The oven has no knob to switch it on. We replaced it but it broke again within a month. So we currently use a corn skewer instead. The fridge doesn’t have salad boxes at the bottom, or the shelf that rests on them, so we just have to pile stuff up at the bottom. The electrical sockets have been misaligned over the tiles so they actually look really dangerous! There’s not enough storage space and what we do have is badly designed, difficult to access and just a bit tired and old. It’s basically a cheap kitchen which has gone through 10 years of tenants living in the house and is looking worse for wear because of it.

I’ve never been someone happy to make my own life easy. While I’m currently trying to get our garden into shape, still working on transforming the office and working on a (more than a few) few blog projects I’ve decided to start planning my kitchen renovation. I should really be writing a post about my dining room chair choices (or lack thereof) but the kitchen is calling. And no, it’s not the sound of the salted caramel ice cream which is now well and truly stuck in our frosted over freezer (yes, the hairdryer is coming out later).

I want to redo everything. I want to move plumbing and strip the walls and take up the flooring. And I want to do all of this with a baby in the house. I can hear every mother in the land screaming at me to stop right now. But the thing is, it’s never going to get easier. There’s never a perfect time to rip out a kitchen. It will always make life harder for a while, but then once it’s all finished life will be easier and I’ll have a beautiful kitchen. I need to keep telling myself this because I’m having minor anxiety attacks every time I actually start to think about how we’re going to do this.

I need to keep the renovation costs down. We have a very small budget so we’ll be doing a lot of the work ourselves. In 5 – 10 years time I’d love to extend our kitchen, but that’s something I just don’t have the money to do now. This actually takes a lot of the pressure off. I’m ok with not having a bespoke kitchen. I’ll be happy with cheaper cabinets knowing they don’t have to last a lifetime. Which means I’m happier being a little more experimental. Trying out a few projects to make a standard kitchen look more individual. Doing things I might not have the guts to do if it were a more expensive kitchen.

So, to help me focus and plan down to the last detail, I’ll be blogging about this. A lot. Expect to hear my ramblings on kitchen door handles very soon. But for now I want to show you some incredible kitchens that have been inspiring me. And if you were in any doubt this is going to be featuring all the wood!

 

 

It’s taken me a long time not to worry about what I should be doing to decorate my kitchen and just to do something I love. I LOVE wood strip cabinets. I have for the last two years. It’s a style I don’t think I’ll be falling out of love with for a few years yet. But even then, I’m planning to use second hand cabinet fronts so I won’t feel too bad about replacing them if I need to.

   

The great thing about using wood is that everything does with it! I want to keep the kitchen light and airy, so the top cabinets are going to be white. But I do want to add wood into other areas of the kitchen without worrying about it looking excessive. I love how these kitchens have used wood details while keeping a minimal finish.

  

I love the idea of light tiles with darker grout, because, well, life. Our kitchen will be well used and frankly, I don’t want to spend my Sunday mornings scrubbing stains out of grout. I want the kitchen to be beautiful, but also low maintenance. I don’t want to have a panic attack every time something gets spilled. This is a huge factor in deciding our worktop. I think I might have come up with the perfect choice. Inexpensive, easy to clean and looks great – but I need some samples before I declare my undying love. Expect a kitchen worktop post soon…

Flooring is another area I’ll be sharing more with you soon. We have already had a few flooring erm.. incidents let’s say, so probably best it gets it’s own post. I’ll be back soon with mood boards, mock ups and DIY updates. In the mean time I would love to hear if any of you have advice for me. Hop over to Instagram and comment on my latest post with your DIY kitchen tips please!