Kichen makeover: Day 1

Things often get worse before they get better. Yesterday we turned our kitchen into a building site. When we first viewed our house, the impression that we were left with was of a nice, bright modern kitchen.

However, when we moved in we discovered that (as with the rest of the place) the decorating was either not very well done or hadn't been done for ages.


In the kitchen, there's a lot of paint flaking off and the vinyl floor tiles were worn and ugly. Also they'd used wallpaper around the cooker and sink - not the easiest thing to keep clean!

So, with the wallpaper already stripped Day One was all about preparing the walls for a paint job and getting up those floor tiles.

Luckily, I already had a heat gun so after a quick read of the safety instructions ("this tool should not be used as a hairdryer" - I kid you not!) it was time to crack on. Having a quick try of getting these up without the heatgun proved impossible, but after heating the corner and into the middle of the tile to loosen the glue (and soften the tile a bit) they came up pretty easily.

I found that gloves were essential - as the glue leaves a big sticky mess everywhere. Knee pads were also a bonus as well as having something sharp to get under the corners. After the tiles were up the floor was even stickier than some of the nightclubs I've been in so we needed to put down dustsheets to make it walkable on.


While I was working on this Radka was preparing the walls for painting by chipping away loose paint and sanding down. Then later, as Radka gave me a break from the floor tiles, I applied some fine filler to the edges of flaked off paint. Hopefully this will stop the old paint from rising and creating bobbles when we put wet paint over it. The fine filler I used was Polyfilla One Fill.


So, our kitchen now looks like a bomb has hit it. It's one-pot meals and takeaways for us for the next week while we sort it out. Next job: painting.