Hand Painted Country-style Kitchen in Doncaster

The owners of Barn Cottage just outside of Blythe in Doncaster were looking to replace this 20 year old country-style kitchen, but after considering the cost of a replacement kitchen and dining area display units, decided to contact the HPKUK website. The cost to replace would be in the region of £25000, far beyond their budget, so they decided to go for a hand-painted alternative at approx 10% of the original cost of replacement.

To add additional storage and working space, a new unit (bottom right) was made, and work surface fitted to match the existing by a local carpenter. The owners were really keen to put a modern twist to this area of their home, but at the same time, it had to be in keeping with the rest of the property, which had been converted from two cottages.

The spec was to create a colour theme with contrasting colours which complimented the existing splash-back tiles that the client had decided to keep. The colour palette was from the Little Green Paint range. I used traditional oil based eggshell on the dining room pine (Normandy Grey No. 79) and for the painted kitchen doors with original pine frames I used (Sage Green No. 80). The Little Green oil eggshell is a highly durable finish and the perfect product for this type of re-finishing.

There was a lot of preparation carried out on this project, especially due to the last paint job! The previous owners had attempted to hand paint the kitchen units themselves and I can only describe the finish as ABSOLUTELY SHOCKING!! I removed every unit door, layed them flat and machine sanded both sides with Mirka Abranet Abrasive discs through a dustless sanding system. This is how I achieve a flawless finish in an almost zero dust free environment.

Now ready for Primer!

Some of the unit doors had been bashed about a bit and had a few chips and dents, but these were easily repaired.

For this particular  project I used a shellac-based high adhesion primer!

After thoroughly de-greasing all kitchen/dining units, I stripped back the pine top to the dining room units. (The top would eventually receive 2/3 coats of Osmo Polyx Oil to protect and enhance the wood. The new section of beech block worktop would also receive the same treatment. Once the high adhesion primer was applied, the kitchen was ready for some colour.

Now for some colour!

Although I’m not bad with colour scheming, I felt that this job required some specialist colour design skills, so I called upon the expert advice of Ingrid at Lilou Interiors. Ingrid works as an on-line colour consultant, with an impressive portfolio of clients throughout the UK and Europe, and even Israel. She is well worth having on board for expert colour advice and design.

Ingrid chose all the colours for this project from Little Green Paint and the Paint Library colour palette;

For the kitchen walls – Little Greene Pitcairn in Absolute Matt emulsion

For the dining area – Paint Library Flower Pot for the feature wall and Foundation for the remainder.

I personally thought the old exposed brickwork added to the previous dated look, so advised the client to take the brave step of having it painted. For the brickwork I chose to use Glidden’s Endurance Pliolite Masonry Paint in white. The ceilings and windows were also painted white.

The kitchen area was painted to the same specification, and we tied the overall effect together by getting rid of the old pine knobs to the doors and draws and replacing them with new ceramic ones, 44 in total!

Here’s what the Client had to say:

Doncaster-kitchen painted

A superb job creating a classic up-beat finish to a dated tired old kitchen. Russ is an exceptional craftsman, a clean methodical worker and his experience was invaluable in giving first class advice and ideas as the work proceeded. Nothing was too much trouble. He was a pleasure to have around and will definitely be returning in the near future to bring his magic to the rest of my house!! Thanks so much Russ…a delighted client.

If you are in Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire and have a project in the pipeline, for a period property or a hand painted country-style kitchen please contact Russ I will be happy to give you the benefit of my experience, and advise you on what is involved to achieve the end result you have in mind