Kitchen Time

The builder's attention has now turned to the kitchen. Our original kitchen had a small opening leading into the dodgy lean-to. The opening only had enough room for a walkway and formed part of the back of the kitchen sink. Our new plans involves widening that opening to create a much bigger open space looking into the kitchen. Because it is a weight-bearing wall, a huge steel lintel will have to be placed into the wall to keep the opening stable.

When it's finished, we hope that this will create the illusion of a much bigger space, especially when we're keeping the ceiling height in the new extension similar to the height in the kitchen. But having a bulkhead over the opening into the kitchen will hopefully separate the kitchen to the new living room. I am not a huge fan of the full open-plan living concept.So today, the builder made cuts into the brick wall, in preparation of removing the extra bricks. There's red dust everywhere as the dust from the bricks stains everything a bright orange red. There's going to be on hell of a clean-up at the end of the renos.

Hubby managed to find time to head down to the stonemasons supplying our kitchen benchtop to check out our granite slab. We fell in love with the Cream and Gold Galaxygranite when we first saw it at the Alby Turner showroom. Hubby was dead-set on having that stone for our benchtop. There was just a tiny problem - the guy who owned the mine supplying that stone was under police investigation for tax evasion and the mine had been shut down. We searched everywhere but no one had any stock left, and nobody knew when or if the mine would reopen again. It appeared that we would have to find another alternative but nothing that we saw looked right. By some miracle, the guys at Alby Turner & Sons managed to track down two slabs of that granite. I have no other where they got it from, but those two slabs are immediately put on hold for us.

So today, hubby decided he would go down to have a look at our slabs. Because natural stone can have such huge variance in the colourings and pattern, we were a little apprehensive. But hubby was happy to report that he was quite satisfied with the appearance of our two slabs. Granted, there is less gold than we would have liked, but the overall appearance of the stone is still that of a warm colour, rather than with too much grey, something that we were worried about.

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