After moving from a rental, I tackled bigger and bigger DIY projects each year. In my final year at my old house, I tackled a simple project (not!): upgrading my kitchen. This involved changing the flooring, moving the sink, replacing the worktops and cabinets, tiling and more!
This video covers the step-by-step of how I did this project.
Video Transcript
Hello, I’m Tristan. One of the biggest DIY jobs that I’ve ever done was in my old house. It was to upgrade the kitchen. Basically, it hadn’t been changed in a long time. So, when we moved in, I decided to upgrade it. I haven’t done anything like this before, so it involves quite a lot of new skills. So, I wanted to show in this video exactly what I’d done.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take videos at the time. I’ve only got photos from five or six years ago. This is just a quick slideshow video to show what I changed.
The first thing that I actually needed to do was do some research. So we went to all of the DIY shops and looked around and got a lot of ideas about what we liked and also looked at some diagrams to work out what we needed to buy and then I could place my order after planning everything out. And then I’ve built all of the units in my garage. In terms of the actual work, I removed all the coving at the top, and then I jumped ahead a little bit here, Unfortunately, I didn’t get any other pictures, but basically I removed a couple of the worktops and I put in a new worktop and I also moved the sink.
Moving the sink was quite challenging because I didn’t have any real plumbing experience, but I got there in the end. It worked out okay, thankfully. And then I just plumbed in the old dishwasher into the new spot after moving the sink. At this point, then I started removing some of the tiles and there we are, carrying on removing the tiles into the boiler, just one or two left there. And at this point I’ve removed the remainder of the tiles, and you can see some mold at the top. So, I knew I needed some sort of extractor fan.
So, there we are, I’ve removed more tiles again. At this stage, before I could change the final work top, I just needed to turn off the gas and there we are. So, I’ve turned off the gas and then I’ve changed that work top, and put in the other worktop as well. So all ready, the kitchen’s looking a lot smarter. There was a lot of plasterboard ripped out because we needed a lot of electrical work. Then you can see the new extractor fan up there to help with some of the mold issues that we had. And you can see it up there as well, and a couple of new sockets around it as well during the electrical work. This then meant I could start tidying things up again. So put an up stand on, as you can see along the wall. And then I started tiling. This was the first time I’d ever tiled, but thankfully it went okay overall. I just did it bit by bit after work and overall I didn’t make any major mistakes. You can see there, just me carrying on into the boiler unit with the tiling. And that’s sort of the end result without any grout. So, I used some metal trim and it looks quite smart overall.
So, that’s me carrying on with the tiling. And at this point, the kitchen starting look really nice again. I’ve now grouted, as you can see there. And then I started changing the laminate because the old one was faulty and starting to get a bit moldy and overall has quite nice effect. As you can see is quite nice looking wood effect. This is the breakfast bar that I added. I added a new floor unit, just a small unit, and then screwed in the actual breakfast bar worktop to form the breakfast bar and it looks pretty good. And it is a really useful space, to be honest. And then finally, you can see, the gas hub has come back on. It’s actually a different gas hub in the end.
We decided to change it and you can see overall, the tile job is not perfect, especially the grout work, but overall it looks quite nice. That’s the final result of the kitchen, then. It’s a lot smarter, in my opinion, than the old one. It was also my first major DIY job and overall, I’m pretty happy that I tackled it.
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