Deconstructing 07….Kitchen Squeeze

The kitchen, for me, is the heart of the home. When we were growing up, the kitchen was everything. It was the office, the dining room, the meeting room, the arguments, and the reconciliation space. To me it was and still is, the most important room in the house – I wanted to get it right so it would continue to be all of the above to my own family.

But to make our job a little more difficult, our space was extremely limited. This room has probably the most troublesome in the house. It was such a hard space to design that Donal woke up at 5 am one morning after a dream of how the room was going to work, then he went downstairs, measured it, and came back up to me to tell me he had figured it out…. which in turn lead to a row as I didn’t agree! The joys of building!!!

We toured Ireland looking for inspiration as well as a good company to work with. And it was hard to find. Most kitchen spaces are standard dimensions, with two decent walls to put presses, shelves, and if you’re lucky, a pantry. But no matter how we moved the kitchen around, we were never going to have that luxury.

I have to say one of the best things we did was take a trip to IKEA. They had the widest range of kitchen designs that we had seen with a huge variety of space sizes, colours, and textures. And it was on this trip that we realised we only had one area in our designated kitchen space that we could use.

This was a wall of 3.9 metres that we figured already had to take our gas boiler as well as our fridge, so space was seriously at a premium. We then worked out we could fit a decent size peninsula in front of this wall that could take either the sink or the hob as well as the dishwasher and squeeze it between a window and door while still allowing enough room to open presses!

All we needed now was to find a good company to help us design it out and make it fit. Simple 😉

We were told about a company in Waterford that did German kitchens so off we went to Evoke. We had a good look around and were very lucky that one of their designers was able to slot us in that day. As we worked through our design with them, it became clear that we could get a beautiful, functional kitchen into the constrictions we had.

I have to say Evoke were brilliant. From the start of the design, the whole way through to the fitting – they kept to the timeframes and were so nice to deal with. We even had a problem with one of the appliances, and they were extremely helpful in getting this sorted. To me, one of the best signs of a good company is how well they can fix a problem. It’s great when everything goes smoothly but you only really know what class of company they are when something goes wrong. 

Now our kitchen is everything I wanted it to be. We often sit there well into the evening chatting after dinner, I’ve taken many a work call at the kitchen table, there’s been plenty of arguments and the odd cup of reconciliation tea!