Is Your Kitchen In Need Of A Little TLC, Or Just A Load Of TNT?

My old kitchen was never conceived by a kitchen designer. Manchester has several excellent kitchen designers and showrooms, but none of them had so much as a fleeting glimpse of my old kitchen. Perhaps that was the best, because the kindest thing you can say about my old kitchen was that it wouldn’t make very much difference if the cooker exploded one day.

I had that many problems with my old kitchen that I decided that what it really need it was the inspirational touch of a modern kitchen designer. Manchester-based kitchen showrooms have clearly demonstrated over the last few years that anyone working within the sort of environment I’ve been calling a kitchen should either be given a medal or put out of their misery.

When you put a cake mixture into the oven it almost seems to take on a life of its own, growing and expanding in ways that can’t be wholly predicted. Sometimes you end up with a perfectly formed cake, and if you’re like me, most of the time you end up with something that looks a little bit like a wart that someone’s been picking at. Sorry, that’s not a very pleasant image, but then neither are my cakes.

But the reason I explained about the cake forming  in its own organic way is because that’s more or less the way my kitchen has developed over the years. When I first moved in I throw in my bits and pieces, and then over the years my kitchen has filled, expanded, been burnt, cracked, and has generally taken on a life of its own. In fact with the peeling worktops with several chips and cracks, there seems to be more life in my old kitchen than there has any right to be.

So having walked past many showroom kitchens, Manchester, I decided it was about time to drag my kitchen screaming and kicking from the 20th century into the 21st century. In fact, to be honest, it was more a case of dragging it from the 19th century. I found the hardest challenge of all to actually be able to visualise a new kitchen within the same space that my old kitchen was still inhabiting.

Some people are excellent at being able to visualise a completely new design on top of an existing space. That is perhaps the greatest skill required by a kitchen designer. Manchester-based kitchen showrooms are fantastic at providing you with a clear idea of what other people’s kitchens probably look like, and what your kitchen could look like, but it’s very hard to either visualise that new kitchen in your old space, or to stand in your old space and try to remember how much better the kitchens looked at the showroom.

After asking for some advice at one of the kitchen showrooms I visited it seemed that there were several possible ways round this dilemma. The easiest and simplest was for me to take measurements of my room, although they did offer to come round to measure up my kitchen themselves, but I can at least operate a tape measure if not my cooker, and then they created a scale plan of my kitchen for us to experiment with whilst browsing the showroom kitchens available.

They were then able to show me on the scale model how my kitchen could be modernised and developed to be able to take advantage of the many innovations and developments offered by their kitchen designer. This included more storage, more economical storage, more versatile storage, and more ingenious storage. Like anybody else, kitchen storage is one of the prime factors involved in redeveloping and modernising a kitchen. Today I am the proud owner of a 21st-century kitchen, which will at least help my guests to be distracted enough not to notice my warty looking cake.