The Top Interior Decor Trends For 2021
I take a look at what will be the key interior decor trends that will enter our homes in 2021…
Read MoreI take a look at what will be the key interior decor trends that will enter our homes in 2021…
Read MoreRead my step-by-step guide on how paint your kitchen cabinets with a chip-proof finish…
Read MoreWhether you are looking to replace your entire kitchen, or simply tweak the one you currently have to make it more modern, the good news is that the top 5 kitchen trends for 2020 are actually quite achievable. I’ve noticed these 5 trends in the most desirable kitchen imagery of late, from high-end glossy magazine shoots to Instagram homes. They provide a consistent formula to an on-trend kitchen for 2020 and are mostly quite simple to install, affordable, plus some can even be DIY’d!
Read MoreTwo years ago I wrote a post on this blog all about a kitchen company who had blown me away when I had seen their kitchen unit drawer and door fronts used in projects across Pinterest and Instagram. I’d never seen anything like it - there were baby blue doors with polished gold handles, scalloped cloud-front patterns and deep green units teamed with gold metal splashbacks. The company was Naked Doors, a Norfolk based kitchen supplier and part of the Naked Kitchens group, who have since been featured in every decent newspaper ‘Home’ supplement and interiors magazine going. Yet, it wasn’t just the interesting designs and coloured fronts which made Naked Doors so appealing, it was the fact that they sold good quality replacement cabinet doors and drawer fronts for existing kitchen units (or, off the shelf IKEA unit carcasses). You didn’t have to purchase a whole new kitchen to achieve the very desirable, contemporary kitchen you’d pinned to your ‘kitchen inspo’ board.
Read MoreHow to choose the right worktop for your home…
Read MoreSometimes it is the simplest changes that can transform a room: a new cushion to refresh a living space or a new vase as a great focal point on an old table. Our kitchen at home is looking a bit tired, but we are years away from replacing it. Yet our kitchen tap was chipped, leaking and covered in ‘you’ll never be able to remove it in a million years’ limescale, so I decided I wanted to swap it out for something special and new to try and reinvigorate the area. Our old tap was a basic chrome bridge tap - so standard, so simple. If I was going to make an impact with a new tap then I wanted something really exceptional and individual, something that would draw attention as the ‘hero’ piece in the kitchen. Instantly, I thought I would want an instagramable polished brass tap, but as I have been working closely with bathroom & kitchen suppliers Kohler this year I was introduced to their very modern, very sexy Karbon single lever tap.
Read MoreI will forever bang-on about how paint can cheaply transform a room. Take a room and paint it a colour which really complements it and it will feel like a completely different space. However, what do you do when you need to transform or create a kitchen on a budget? It is not as easy as just painting the walls when there are the units to consider. This is why many of us now own or are tempted to install a kitchen from purse-friendly flat-pack giants IKEA. Base or wall units from IKEA can come in at less than £100 each, where as a made-to-measure kitchen will set you back thousands upon thousands of pounds (most of that money will be spent on crafting the carcass of the units - the bits you use but don't actually see). The problem here is that you end up with a budget-friendly but very plain, generic-looking kitchen.
Read MoreThere are a few reasons as to why I decided to attempt a DIY kitchen splash-back, even though I had never tiled before in my entire life! The main and most obvious reason was of-course money. Our old cooker had died a very sad death the day before Christmas and we couldn't get one the same size, so we had to have someone come and cut away the worktop and a section of the units to fit in the wide new cooker. We then had to have a joiner in to re-build part of the base units once the installation was complete. The wall tiles also came a cropper as part of the switch-over, but I just did not have a spare £500 to give a professional tiler to come and sort that out aswell. Yet, another reason apart from money was that I had discovered the new Syren range of wall tiles by Topps Tiles.
Read MoreOur oven decided to stop working two days before Christmas. Including us, there were 8 people to cook for on Christmas Day. We ended up making roast potatoes in a frying pan and relied on a lot of boiled vegetables to get us through the meal. Feverishly attempting to purchase a new oven in the Boxing Day sales we found the age-old range installed by the previous owners was a tiny 76cm wide, with the modern standard width being 90cm. The only thing to do was to cut down the existing cabinets and shave back the worktop to make room for a larger cooker. This has now all been done and we have a lovely shiny new oven, but I'm left with half my kitchen units unpainted, plus a missing splashback (they had to remove the tiles to fit the new cooker). I now need to give my kitchen a mini-refresh, and as we are at the start of the year I've been looking towards predictions for kitchen trends in 2018 to give me a bit of kitchen design inspiration.
Read MoreOur old range cooker was inherited from the previous owners of the house when we moved in three years ago. To be honest, it was always on its way out - one hob never worked and over time it took so long to cook anything I probably could have gone outside and rubbed two sticks together to create fire to boil a pan of water quicker than the time it took to cook a pizza to a decent standard in that oven. So when it finally packed up completely two days before Christmas (we ended up making roast potatoes in a frying pan for Christmas dinner) it was time to start 2018 with a brand new cooker.
Read MoreOn my Instagram and under my Pinterest board 'Kitchen Inspo', I had been collecting up and re-gramming these amazing images of kitchens - such as the one below of the most amazing baby blue kitchen with polished gold handles. It looks so good, right? You'd instantly think it was a completely bespoke, designer-led kitchen costing you 25k plus.
Read MoreHate your kitchen? Want to upgrade? Would love a designer kitchen but don't have the cash? Never fear, it is possible, believe it or not, to get a designer kitchen (or your kitchen looking designer) without having to sell one of your kidneys. There are a few tricks out there that can transform your kitchen from bleak and basic, into something much more suited to your style. If you are someone with champagne taste on a prosecco budget (or even a cheap white wine budget) then read on for my tips to get that designer kitchen for less!
Read MoreWe all know that kitchens are the area of the home that can suck away all our hard-earned cash. The units, worktops, fixtures and fittings - all these things often cost a lot of money. I know people who have been put off purchasing a home as the kitchen has not been to their taste or style, and they can't afford to also purchase a sleek, shiny new kitchen on top of the property price.
Read MoreIf you have not used it before, then let me tell you that chalkboard paint is flippin' brilliant. You can buy it in tiny pots from the DIY store or places like Hobbycraft for about £3, and you can apply it to pretty much everything. I've used chalkboard paint a lot in my kitchen where I use it on cheap food storage pots to label what food is inside, and turn something plain into something a lot more interesting. I also painted a shopping list board on an unused, thin bit of wall next to our cooker. This has made it easy for everyone in the house to just list what is needed on the board (no random scraps of paper everywhere) for the next time someone pops down the shops. I didn't have to bother finding and buying a 'proper' chalk board to fit this area and hang up. It also gets used and wiped constantly, yet it remains completely durable.
Read MoreI made this chopping board for my husband at the end of last year. He's quite the foodie and cooks all his meals from scratch (unlike me, I love food but not cooking. When he isn't home I'm more of a G&T and a slice of cheese-on-toast girl).
I love kitchen equipment made from natural materials. I'll watch a Jamie Oliver programme to lust over his bread boards rather than his foccacia. Of course kitchen like this can be quite pricey, but seeing as I live right on the cusp on Epping Forest I thought why not give making our own tree trunk chopping board a go?
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