Hatty's Home Tour: Kitchen

One thing you will come to know about us is we love to design our homes. We like to do this in as much of a thrifty and DIY way as possible. I love spending Sunday mornings scouring the car boots sales and the afternoons in the bric-a-brac section of the charity shops. Most of the thing in my house are second hand with a few things here and there from IKEA, because come on, who doesn’t love a bit of IKEA?!

My other more recent obsession it with orange, you will notice a lot of orange as a take you through the various rooms. It is such a bright and cheerful colour but warm too.

I wanted the house to be bright, light but also cosy, as the months of winter are long here in Old Brighty.

I started by painting everything brilliant white, walls, ceilings, (floors where possible) doors, and main pieces of furniture.  I got the high eye browed look from a lot of people when I said I was doing this, people said it would feel cold and plain, but I think it does the opposite, it gave me a blank canvas to work.

The kitchen was and plain MDF fitted kitchen, a light tan colour, the floor a horrible, tatty lino and the whole house was magnolia. So I painted the walls white and all the cupboard doors. I also lined the backs of the cupboards with Julie Dodsworth wrapping paper which some may think was a little unnecessary but I love the pop of colour you get when you open the cupboards. I also changed the door knobs which a set of mix matched knobs from ebay.

We cook a lots so we splurged on huge white cooker (in a dream world this would be a Rangemaster or an Aga). I also have lots of spices and wanted them to be on show and easily accessible. I searched for random spice racks at car boots and painted them orange for another pop of colour.

In the future I would like to replace the backsplash with white brick tiles with a dark grey grout (see below), and either white or wooden worktops, what do you think?

Image source: athousandlaughingstarfish.blogspot.com