The tin said sixteen hours before the next coat. I gave it about five, because it was Sunday 13 April, the housewarming was six days away and I wanted the doors back on. By Monday morning the first door had wrinkled like the skin on a rice pudding, and I spent three evenings sanding it back and starting again.
That is the one mistake I would take back, and it came at the end of a list that otherwise stood up. We can't afford a new kitchen yet, so this is what £1,160 bought us across the Easter holidays and a handful of weekends.
Every pound
- Primer and cupboard paint: £104
- 14 new handles: £56
- Two lengths of laminate worktop: £218
- Joiner to cut and fit the worktop joint: £190
- Tap: £89
- White metro tiles, adhesive and grout: £118
- Cushioned vinyl floor: £172
- Sundries (sealant, sandpaper, rollers, filler): £63
- Under-cabinet LED strip: £35
- New sink waste and trap: £22
- Skip bag: £93
The skip bag was the line I'd underbudgeted. It held the old worktop, the old vinyl, the sink waste and a surprising amount of dust, and it sat on the pavement for five days, getting steadily fuller and more embarrassing.
The paint, the doors and the handles
The 1990s units were a dark oak effect with brass handles. Every door came off with a masking-tape number on the back, got degreased with sugar soap, sanded, primed and painted on trestles in the back room. The carcasses were done in place. We chose a soft sage green. Then came the new handles, and the discovery that four doors had holes at a different spacing from the rest. Matt filled and redrilled them with a jig he made from an offcut of ply, because Matt makes a jig for everything.
The housewarming happened with new handles, new paint and the old worktop, which looked even more tired next to them.
The bit we paid someone for
The worktop is laminate, two lengths that meet at a corner, and the joint where they meet is the thing that goes wrong. Matt could probably have cut it, but a bad cut in laminate can't be undone and £218 of worktop is £218 of worktop, so a joiner came on Wednesday 30 April. He was there about two hours, got through four mugs of tea and went home with £190. The joint is tight enough that I've stopped running a fingernail along it.
The rest we did ourselves. Matt swapped the tap and the sink waste, with the stopcock we found in week one doing the heavy lifting. I tiled the splashback over the May bank holiday weekend: a notched trowel, spacers, Jas's tile cutter and an evening of swearing at the last row round the socket. White tiles, white grout. I'll admit that the first five rows are better than the last three. The vinyl came the following weekend, cut from a paper template, with double-sided tape and a long steel rule.
Why the layout didn't move
The sink is still under the window, the hob is where it was and the boiler is in the same wall cupboard. Moving any of that means a plumber, a gas fitter and a new route for the waste, and that is where a kitchen bill starts to grow. Keeping the layout is the dull part of the plan and the part that saved most. It means the room still works the way it did, only the doors, the top, the floor and the splashback look different.
The kitchen has one more occupant to get used to. On Saturday we adopted a cat, who is currently under a bed upstairs and has not yet been shown the vinyl.
