Kitchen Test Drive

On Tuesday, I had an appointment  with Blum to do a “Kitchen Test Drive”. This is where they have a dedicated room where you can reproduce a life-sized model of your kitchen. You have the chance to test the layout to see how it works, how the space feels.

Prior to the appointment, I sent them our plans to date, which they then used to set the kitchen up before I arrived. This is the layout:

And this is what the test kitchen looked like:

The island width isn’t quite right – she added another module to indicate the width but didn’t do it all the way across. The pantry is also missing (you can see my red bag where the pantry should be), as is the coffee area, but the fridge is in the right location.

And here’s a photo of me pretending to put away the clean dishes from the dishwasher:

This actually confirms that if we’d put the dishwasher in the end module, it would have been awkward to use.

The kitchen felt quite big and spacious, which is what we wanted. we could perhaps consider moving the island in a little closer, as there is a fair amount of room between it and the stove, but on the other hand it means less likelihood of kitchen collisions!

The Blum kitchen designer basically went through the measurements and we talked about the types of drawers we wanted, widths and depths, what would look nice, what would fit where, and the various options available. She took heaps of notes and promised to tidy them up, draw up a plan, and send them to me, hopefully this week.

After we’d finished in the kitchen, I took another look in the showroom and basically opened every drawer and cupboard and took photos. Here’s some of what I found:

I won’t bore you with more storage and organisation pictures, I think you get the idea!

I’m not sure how many of these things we’ll end up using, I suspect it will be determined by our budget! There are probably cheaper places that produce equally useful organisational thingies that we should investigate, at some point.

(Note: Edited to reorganise pictures)