Knocking through to create an open-plan kitchen

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Claire and Conrad Almond knocked through into their utility room to create a large stylish open-plan kitchen area.

'We moved into our house in September 2010 - it was pretty much everything we wanted in a house with one exception - the kitchen. There was nothing wrong with it as such - it was good quality, only about four years old, but just not us! So, even before we moved in, we started drawing up plans, visiting kitchen show rooms and surfing the internet, to come up with our dream kitchen.'

'We wanted to create a modern style kitchen and by a stroke of luck, when we were looking for stockists of our Elica Star cooker hood, we came across Pure Kitchens (purekitchens.org.uk). Following numerous Saturday mornings with Steve, one of the kitchen designers, in its show room in St Albans, we came up with the kitchen design we wanted. The units had to come from Italy so, to allow for this, a date was set for the begining of November for the work to start on the kitchen.'

'We knew the biggest jobs would be knocking down the utility room wall and moving the boiler to help create the open-plan space we desired. Then all of the original floor tiles needed to be lifted and disposed of to make way for the new sparkly black ones.'

'In the meantime, we had to find the right finishing touches such as a pink glittery splash back from a local glass supplier, we even found radiators with a slightly sparkly finish and of course the great colourful Cola Red Liberty bar stools (cola-red.com).'

'We had always liked the idea of an American diner style kitchen but it didn't seem to fit the bill for the space but when we came across Cola Red Liberty Stools via Google it looked like maybe we could have the best of both worlds. Cola Red were very helpful and allowed us to visit their showroom in Gerrards Cross by appointment on a Saturday morning and we were delighted with what we saw. In the end, we settled on four stools - one each of chalk white, velvet black, raspberry pink and rose pink with swivel seats.'

'We are thrilled with our new kitchen which was finished just in time for Christmas - only trouble is it is too nice to mess up with cooking.'

This feature was Project of the month in August 2011.