Our First Home.

Our first home was a mid terraced cottage.We had never heard of Luthermuir until we moved here in 2007 and lived here very happily for 5 years. 

This was our kitchen.I still miss it.

  

Iit was built by Euan from scratch and he had never made anything before we bought our house. We couldnt afford to pay a carpenter to do the work for us so he bought tools and taught himself. We found pictures of kitchens we loved in magazines-all with enormous price tags!! Euan did a wonderful job of bringing the design we came up with to life, making the frame, shelves, cupboard doors, drawers and false door/drawer combos to hide the fridge and washing machine. All the materials and oak worktops cost us less than £900 in total. It was a huge undertaking though- we didnt even have a garage let alone a workshop so most of the carpentry was done in the kitchen or in our small hallway.

We bought most of the wood for the frame from a saw-mill less than a mile up the road from our house. The oak worktops are from Ikea.The belfast sink was an ebay bargain. We created the false chimney breast and the oak beam was given to us by a guy Euan met in the pub where he used to work! We splashed out on the Redfyre. I always wanted a Aga but to be honest-you pay a lot for the name. Our Redfyre looks exactly like an Aga but was much cheaper to buy.We even got a great deal on that by paying cash for the shop display one and collecting it ourselves. It did take 3 of Euans friends to help us get it into the kitchen though.

I love the matching overhead cupboards with glass doors that house all our recipe books and my pretty kitchen things.We decided the depth of them in order to accomodate an unusually large Nigella Lawson Christmas Cookbook I have! Buzz, our black cat is often found snoozing on top of one of them.

It wasnt perfect ( so dont look too closely!!) but we loved it and were very proud of it because we made it ourselves.

Here are some photos of our old living room.We built the fireplace ourselves and had a woodburning stove installed. It was such a cosy room in the winter months.

We had the TVs s in this cupboard- another Ebay bargain at £50.

Euan made the coffee table from a set of old pine shelves that came out of my parents house.

We couldnt find a place for them so we took them apart and used the wood.

I made the tartan and kate forman cushions on the sofas, the curtains and recently, the upholstered fender in front of the fireplace which strategically covered up some burn marks on the carpet!!

This is looking back into the hallway. The old door into the room was in one corner- we rebuilt the wall to allow double doors in the centre which makes the space in both the living room and the hallway have a much better feel. We found the doors on Gumtree for £10 and then built the wall and opening around them.