The kitchen... not the best start...

You might be forgiven for thinking my kitchen is rather lovely...

It's really not. This is a pretend kitchen I made by leaning a bench against our one good wall and covering the joins with kitchenalia.

My kitchen isn't worthy of a nice splashback just yet. But for my next trick, using nothing but the power of my mind, some planks of wood and a tin of paint, I'm going to create a splendid kitchen makeover. I hope.

Here's the before...

It's never this tidy

This is an eighties extension with an eighties kitchen. There's not much about it that I like.

The cupboards are in good condition apart from the one under the sink whose bottom rotted due to a leak before we bought the house.

They're a bit dated though. As are the tiles, the floor, the ceiling and the sink.

Oh, and the worktops too.

Door to the garden.

This wall is okay because I already pulled off all the tiles and clad it in easipanel. That was back in  September 2012 and you can read about it here.

I painted the ceiling, stripped some wallpaper and coved this end of the kitchen. Then I got bored. 

Door to the office. Never even painted it.

The problem is, this is just the new extension. There's another part which was the old kitchen. 

This sits between the extension and the dining room.

Door to dining room, really ugly radiator and pantry that you must stoop to enter.

As you can see, I've stripped most of the wallpaper off. The walls beneath are dreadful. I've never really managed to get very far with the kitchen. The combination of dust and food prep is not a good one. Because it's basically two long thin rooms back to back there are lots of cupboards, bad walls and it seems a mountain of a task.

But I can't put it off any longer. I want to fit a splashback and I need a nice kitchen to do it proud.

I've made a start but it did go slightly wrong. The wall on the left of the door above was tiled. I pulled those off and started to remove the skirting. The skirting runs under the cabinets and I couldn't get it out. It moved very slowly like it might be secured to something. We wondered if it might be electric cables. We could see cables were behind the cabinets. Anyway, after much tugging, I gave up and sawed the skirting off.

The next day I could smell burning in that area. A kind of plasticcy electriccy smouldering smell.

I decided that the only way to see if I'd upset a cable was to dismantle the kitchen and look behind the cabinets. My husband was a bit cross.

I took off the worktop, wrestled with the drawers, unfastened the units from each other, unfastened the units from the wall and slid them out.

The cables were well away from the skirting and there was no sign of any damage having been done.

Pleased that the house wasn't going to burn down after all, I popped into town to run some errands. Then I had to rebuild the kitchen before the school run.

I then realised the burning smell was probably from the under cabinet lighting that was grimy and dusty and that I'd tried to fix by swapping the bulbs around. Oops.

So Day 2 saw no progress whatsoever apart from having vacuumed some cobwebs out from behind the units. But I do know how to build kitchen cabinets and deal with an electrical fire now. ( I rang my dad. Poor dad. I think he thought I was in the midst of a fire.)

Next time I'll share my plans for this space.I'm praying we don't have any more mishaps!

THANK YOU for all your kind comments, messages and encouragement on my last post! You rock.