Around the House in 80 Hours: Week 2 – Kitchen

This week was all about the kitchen.  I basically wanted to give it a really deep clean, a thorough organise and a little bit of prettying.  We all worked so hard on this, clocking up over 50 hours between us.  Gary helped out by giving me a whole day of work, which given it was on his only day off, I was very grateful for.  So between us, with zero budget again, we:

• Scrubbed all the walls and tiles, especially the splash back behind the sink, and the tiles at the back of the cooker, which were quite disgusting!
• Lillie cleaned the whole of the range
• Thomas moved all the cabinets (they are all free-standing) and scrubbed behind them, cleared the floor below them and swept, mopped and scrubbed the floor tiles.
• Charlotte cleaned the units, with the help of the little ones.
• Gary dismantled the sink unit from all the pipes, changed the taps (which were so worn they dripped and wobbled constantly) for some taps we had kept from the time we had our kitchen refurbished, cleared behind the sink unit and repaired the towel rack.
• I repainted the room, went through all the drawers and cupboards, reorganised our ‘spice cabinet’ so it only contained tea, coffee and chocolate making supplies and condiments.  I made and attached some material squares to the dresser to hide the glasses and mugs, as well as hand sewed some matching curtains for the windows. The material I used was from Laura Ashley twenty years ago, which we had hanging in our very first home together.  I just cut to size and resewed.  I love them!  I also stapled some of the left over material inside the two wooden storage boxes sitting in one of the free standing units.
• I bleached and killed all the mold on one of the walls and changed about some ornaments to give it a fresh new look.  I also scrubbed the oak sink surround, which due to neglect had started to turn black, as well as bleaching the sink a sparkling white again.
• I also brought my gorgeous Portmeirion China out from the dresser to use every day.  We have been using plastic dishes whilst we still had young children to reduce the breakages, but we are ready to bite the bullet and go full on china!

Here are the photos:

From the hall door way looking to the left of the kitchen:

And looking to the right:

With curtains drawn:

And a curtain close up:

Accessories:

A close up of the dresser:

And looking towards the bathroom:

We spent a couple of pounds on some new washers for the tap and some wood glue, everything else we used was whatever we had on hand.  I still have a few more things I want to do so have made a page to go in my (newly created) household management book:

Next week we will be focusing on the Living room and hallway area.