Deb from
Two Cheeky Monkeys went to do a minor kitchen renovation that turned out to be a lot bigger than originally planned. This is how the story unfolded:
"We live in a house which is about 25 years old. All of the appliances were the same age as the house, so it wasn't a big surprise when our oven and cooktop unit started to fall apart. I was initially excited about replacing this old unit however, what we thought would be a simple replacement of our oven and cooktop turned into a bigger job than we had imagined.
Our old oven/cooktop unit was not the standard 60 or 90cm in width, but was 70cm wide. This really limited the range of new units we could investigate, so we decided it would be wiser to install a separate cooktop and oven rather than an all in one unit. We decided on a 70cm electric oven by Andi and ad 70cm gas cooktop by AEG-Electrolux.
The decision to buy separate cooking units meant that our builder would be building a cabinet for the oven as well as adding a new section of bench top where the previous oven/cooktop unit had lived. This didn't seem too complex until our builder couldn't find any laminate to even vaguely match our existing bench tops. His initial solution of replacing the laminate on all of our bench tops was way over our budget and meant too much disruption to our kitchen. After a few days, our builder came up with a suggestion of covering our new bench top and splashback with stainless steel. This was not only affordable, but would make cleaning a lot easier!
We weren't sure the stainless steel look would suit our rather retro kitchen, but we figured that we didn't really have much to lose so agreed with the new plan. The whole project took our builder, electrician and plumber 3 and a half days to finish due to a few problems which arose such as slight warping of our floor and cupboards due to the age of our house and also due to inaccuracies in the unit measurements supplied by the manufacturers of the oven.
Anyway, the work was finally completed and we are happy with the outcome. We have great new appliances to cook with and they don't stick out too much in our kitchen. And most of all, it was all within budget!
"
This is not an unusual story. It is also very common when replacing wall ovens set directly into the wall. Older ovens are bigger than newer models.
Have you known someone to start what seemed to be a simple change in the kitchen but ended up with a major renovation?
What
do you think of Deb's builder's creative solution?
