Achieving Our Kitchen Goals Despite A Little Hiccup!

1634

Scandinavian
HDB (BTO)
~1,300 sqft
4 br
Living with Family

Hi everyone we're back! This time we'll be talking about our kitchen. This is a galley style kitchen that also includes a laundry area. We opted for the open concept look as it would suit the overall theme of the house. To mitigate the effects of oil & grease, we chose materials that are easy to clean & maintain. Most times a simple wipe down was all it took as the Fujioh chimney hood did a fine job of absorbing the smell & oily fumes.
Renovating the kitchen was a stark reminder that until you see the actual thing, one can never totally rely on the floor plan to give a full picture of how the house would look like. Expecting a flat wall, we were flabbergasted when we saw that it wasn't and to make matters worse, there's even a long exposed water pipe. This would pose a challenge for us to achieve the open seamless look that we envisioned. The natural solution would be to install upper cabinets. While this might help the situation, we felt that it was probably not cost effective as there would not be much usable storage space to work with. Also the upper cabinets might visually make the already long & narrow kitchen look even smaller. So in the end we chose to stick with our original plan of not having any uppers & just did a boxed up & luckily the result turned out to be quite well in our opinion.
The colour palette is neutral, which is consistent with the rest of the house. The combination of dark oak laminates with white table top & white subway tiles, plus the large format grey floor tiles, gave the kitchen a warm but yet bright & airy vibe.
We had 2 shelves installed for putting the items we use frequently. We also tried to decorate the space with some plants & interesting kitchenware.
Our love for lamps is once again on display with this Tolomeo Wall Lamp from Artemide. It is one of the few task lighting in the kitchen. This is important as the ceiling lights alone are not enough when it comes to food preparation & cooking. To liven things up we added colours in the form of Marimekko cups, Moomin dish cloths & timer, and a Arne Jacobsen table clock. This makes working in the kitchen a little more fun & enjoyable.
One of the best decisions we made during reno was to install this boiling water tap. It is space saving and provides filtered ambient & close to 100 degree celsius hot water 24/7. We no longer need to wait for the kettle to boil in the morning or use an electric airpot that takes up counter space. We can also tackle tough stains & grease easily with the hot water. It is just so convenient!
A must-have in our kitchen is the standalone range cooker. We found this Straaten 90cm one on Lazada that had quite a number of good reviews. It comes with brass burners and has an oven volume of 120L. The best part is it is much more affordable than those famous branded ones with similar specs. We took the plunge & never looked back.
We already knew very early on in our planning stage that we wanted a Blum Kitchen. So we chose the installer with the most 5 star reviews from their list of partners. He ended up renovating our whole house.
The peninsula provides ample space for most of our food preparation. It also doubles up as a bar table on the other side. Our kitchen is a space where form & function coexist. It has everything we needed & more. We will certainly enjoy it for many years to come!