Diary of a Fitted Kitchen installation: Part 4
Follow us as we take a journey following our own new kitchen installation from start to finish, giving you a bird’s eye view of the kitchen design and fitting process.
Sink & Taps, Handles and an introduction to Worktops.
There is so much choice when it comes to fitted kitchen hardware, visually a sink and taps should be pleasing on the eye but it’s worth considering how you actually use a sink. Our current sink is a bowl and a half, the actual sink part of it isn’t big enough for an oven tray to fit easily in for washing up and when I thought about it the only time I used the small sink on the side was to throw tea down after I had filled the bowl next to it! There was no way I could put large cooking trays into soak and so washing up items that wouldn’t go in the dishwasher after entertaining was a pain.
Size was my main criteria and I was happy to lose the smaller bowl in favour of a large single bowl, I also wanted a drainer with grooves so any water from washing up drained away. You can achieve this by either having a sink with a drainer or have drainer grooves in your worktop. My last kitchen had grooves in the worktop and I was always very happy with this set up, it’s also less stainless steel to clean, I had already decided I wanted a Stainless Steel kitchen sink as oppose to a ceramic or granite, I’m not opposed to them in any way, they have a rustic feel to them in my opinion and I personally prefer the look of stainless for my kitchen! I have decided to go for a single sink with drainers in the worktops.
Although I didn’t want handles on my kitchen I still had to decide on the colour of the aluminium rail and the colour choices were rose gold, gold, steel and black. For me it was an easy choice and I went with steel. I then decided that although I didn’t want handles on the main cupboards I would go for a contrasting look on the cupboards that were graphite in colour and somewhat larger in size and decided upon a plain black handle to compliment the graphite shade.
Worktops play a massive part in how your kitchen looks and feels, when it comes to picking the textures and colours that best suit your space, it’s important that you are aware of how much worktop space is available and how that would suit your needs. With a seemingly unlimited variety of materials, formats, and colours, worktops really are a tough one. Cosentino, the manufacturer of kitchen worktops, made it very hard for me to choose between Silestone and Dekton. Silestone is made of more than 90% of natural quartz which makes it strong, with outstanding resistance and durability in an area like the kitchen where these benefits are essential. The main features of Dekton such as its resistance to low and high temperatures, contact with water and the large format slabs of varying thickness give it an inviting versatility. In the next Blog I will share my visit to Cosentino (not the one in Spain sadly but more local to me) but I am super excited to see how things are done there and learn some more about worktops before I choose.