English Rose Kitchen

So we spent the day going round timber merchants and flooring places receiving more and more conflicting information. Most conflicting of all was whether it would be better to use solid or engineered flooring.

Even more confusing than that was the cost. Looking online we can see all sorts of flooring that seems to match our needs around the £30..£40 a square metre for solid oak, with engineered boards coming in at considerably less. Going round today the only flooring we saw that we liked was in the £110 range, with engineered flooring costing about the same.

Also we’d previously been advised that we’d be best off using solid wood, but today a very nice man in a very reputable shop told us that because we’e laying on top of a pine floor with a 15″ drop underneath it our best bet would be to put down a layer of marine ply to cut off the damp, and then use engineered planks, partly because the lower layers are better at absorbing damp and partly because engineered boards are stronger at the width we want them, around 180mm. That’s in sharp contrast to previous advice, which was that solid wood is stronger for wider boards.

Ho hum.

Remember how gutted we were to have to sell our gorgeous Smeg FAB28? I guess we still miss it in all its retro glory, but we knew inside that our storage requirements greater than it could offer.

It turns out that that we couldn’t be happier with its replacement, the glorious Electrolux American Fridge Freezer ENL62981XX3. Despite the issue of the exterior being far from the “excellent condition” described in the eBay auction, it works perfectly and it’s a revelation to be able to see and access its entire contents without resorting to Pilates style contortions. Also far less food is getting wasted due to either disappearing to the nether regions or getting frozen to the rear wall. Fridge burn is a thing of the past.

The freezer half of it too is a joy to use. Being able to see every item clearly is  a real advantage. The tendancy with our old box of a freezer was to put things in unmarked plastic boxes, stack them in one of the four compartments and … periodically wonder what they were.

The floor of our kitchen, which runs through to the living room, needs replacing. It’s sad, because it has a lot of character, most of it being original. In fact it has a little too much character because the gaps are now far too wide in some places (the newer floorboards mainly) and there are holes in the wood in others. We have to keep something over a particular pair of holes to stop our inquisitive cat from going down there.

We’ve looked at oak flooring and if we go with that we’re going to want each board to be prety wide just for the look. We’re planning to lay it across the old flooring at right angles to the current direction. I realise that’ll raise problems if we ever have to go under the floor for any reason.

Another flooring idea (Ray’s) is to use some sort of veneered MDF and paint it with harlequin style squares (i.e. the squares will be running diagonally). I have no idea how practical this could be, although it certainaly would be cheaper if it was and would fit the look of the kitchen. Ray also wants to put some of that aluminium flooring around where the kitchen units themselves are.