When it comes to time to refurbish your kitchen there is virtually no limit to what you can achieve, but it will depend very much on your budget. In most homes, the kitchen is the most expensive room in the house, when you take into consideration all of the appliances that you need. These include a cooker, microwave, fridge, freezer, dish washer, just as basics. Then in many homes the kitchen also houses the washing machine and tumble dryer.
Then there are the questions of floor tiling, which is the perfect material for a kitchen, possibly wall tiling, cabinetry, and last but not least, the worktops and splashbacks. All of this little lot can run into thousands and thousands. Indeed, it is very easy to spend £25,000 and often a lot more.
In fact, quite a number of people do spend more on renovating the kitchen because they extend it into the garden. Back in the day, we used to cook in the kitchen and eat in the dining room, but now many kitchens are used for eating meals as well, and as a consequence have become the room where we entertain guests for a dinner party. This does mean that for many homes the kitchen will need to be extended, because it is often a fairly small room. It is just that we have crammed more and more into it.
If you go back to the 1950’s, we didn’t have washing machines, fridges, freezers, and tumble dryers. They hadn’t been invented! So, kitchens were designed to accommodate a cooker for cooking, cabinets to hold the cooking utensils, pots, pans, cutlery, and so on, and food was kept in a larder. Yes, we had to run out to the shops more often because there was no frozen food, and the milk was delivered every day by the milkman and wasn’t kept in the non-existent fridge. Today, with fridges and freezers, we do the weekly shop and that’s it.
Moreover, we do have all these appliances, and we also want the kitchen to be a room in which we like to be, so that means that it needs to look great, have a TV, and so on, and have a table at which we can sit and eat. So, if you are re-designing your kitchen, you either need to have a very big budget or make decisions about where to draw the line.
This means that while it might be nice to have a new cooker, if the current one is working perfectly well it will need to stay. The same goes for the fridge, freezer, dishwasher, and so on, and possibly the washing machine and tumble dryer. However, you are going to want the kitchen to look great, and two of the most important parts that stand out are the floor and the worktops. This is because they are horizontal, and they take up quite a lot of space. As we said, tiling is great for a kitchen floor, but you could use other materials.
When it comes to the worktops you have a wide choice of materials here too. The worktops not only need to look good, but they also need to be able to take a certain amount of punishment. Wood can look great, but it does need a great deal of care and maintenance. Laminates are low cost, and come in a wide range of colours, but are prone to chips and scratches.
Stainless steel is another choice, and the material that is used in almost every restaurant kitchen, because it is tough and scratch resistant and very easy to clean. However, for most people, having it in a home kitchen makes it look far too clinical. Polished cement is another option but is very heavy and prone to scratches. It is also porous and can stain.
Many people today are choosing natural stone for their kitchen worktops, such as marble, granite, quartzite, and limestone. Of these, granite worktops in London are by far the toughest material, and granite is available in a wide range of patterns and colours, each of which is unique because it is a natural stone. It is not the cheapest material for a worktop, but if you want something that looks fabulous and can take a great deal of punishment, then granite is for you.
