I wrote a post a while back about the weird anomalies of our house and it is the most popular substack I ever wrote. It came as a nice surprise because it wasn’t remotely related to illustration. Now I know I can go totally off subject and no one will mind. Thank you.
So with that in mind I wondered if you fancied seeing a photo round up of our kitchen transformation, starting with spooky vibes and a mysterious sink hole, and ending with two happy illustrators who NEVER LEAVE the kitchen. Here goes.
This is the room before it became our new kitchen. We had actually stopped using it all together because it was so cold and dark. I don’t believe in ghosts but his room felt weirdly cold and generally gave off spooky vibes.
It had become a dumping ground for any old clutter we had kicking about the house. One of the worse things about this room was that here was a mysterious mound in the concrete floor, with a big crack running the length of the room.
So we asked the builder to dig up the old concrete floor and see what was going on underneath. It turned out it had zero insulation, it was just a thin layer of concrete onto earth, which explains why the room was so cold.
And the crack in the concrete was caused by an underground spring. There are lots of springs in this area, hence all the old breweries in Tweedmouth. The builder thinks that years ago there had been a flood underground that had surged up and taken away some earth. But the earth was totally dry now, so he dug down to make room for a lovely thick layer of insulation, then put down a new floor.
We opened up the original fireplace which had been bricked up in the 1960’s. We (when I say we I mean our brilliant builders) cut out a new window opening because this room was really dark and dingy. The builder found a bone in the wall. Apparently there was an abattoir round here and builders used the bones as rubble. Nice!
We didn’t know where to start with designing a kitchen so went to our local kitchen design shop to ask them to show us some ideas. But the design software was so bad that it hurt our delicate illustrator eyes and we couldn’t get past that. Look at those chairs and the fake view out of the window! It must be hard to please two very visual, over judgemental illustrators. Ha!
Putting aside the problems with the depressing software, they also didn’t have any kitchens made of real wood. Only fake wood, a plastic wood effect on MDF.
We had been hoping for something built of plywood, with inset doors, inspired by my favourite kitchen of all time: Judith Kerr’s kitchen which appears in her book, ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’. We worked out very quickly that we wouldn’t be able to buy that from our two local kitchen shops.
So I asked my hairdresser, who is a fountain of knowledge and knows everyone and everything there is to know in this small town what we should do. She gave us the name of a joiner who could build us a plywood kitchen from scratch.
And so we set forth designing our own kitchen.
By the way this is our old kitchen which came with the house, it is in a 1960’s extension and is still there. We are a two kitchen family until we dismantle the old one. Aren’t we fancy?
Ben, our brilliant joiner built us this unit as a sample. We loved it, so he got to work on the rest.
In the meantime we chose light fittings and worktops etc. We went for a blue Formica 1960’s cafe style worktop.
We did ‘The Spaghetti Bolognaise Test’ to see which wood protector would stop strong red pasta sauce staining the plywood. We can’t live without a good pasta sauce! In the end we chose clear Osmo, recommend by Printed Peanut’s husband who used it on their beautiful plywood kitchen. Thanks Mr Peanut!
I made a black gingham curtain to hide the washing machine and Ben made us a peg rack for tea towels. Then we papered behind the bin with an old map of Berwick and varnished it to stop tea bag drips staining the wall.
This corner of the kitchen was crying out from some colour so we decided on a splash of arsenic green on the old 1960’s cupboard.
The room isn’t square, it’s like a squinty parallelogram, so we decided on a herringbone floor rather than straight boards which might have highlighted the squintyness.
So here it is!
We now spend all our time hanging out at the kitchen table. It’s such a turnaround from a room we never used because of the spooky vibes.
I thought we might have had a haunting on our hands but it turned out to be lack of insulation! 👻👻👻
Tell me in the comments below about the spooky bits of your house or your new/ old kitchens.
Love Helenx
This is brilliant I love it all! Very inspired by the curtain covering the washing machine idea. Can I ask what fittings did you use for the curtain? Is it one of those stretchy cord things like my grandma had for her curtains or did you rig up a pole? I basically want to copy this.
Ha! My best kitchen's were designed on the back of an envelope and given to our builder. My mum made those gingham curtains for her dresser (now mine) 45 years ago. A lovely reminder of her. X