‘Freestanding units keep It casual’

Stylist at Home Jillian, 46, extended her kitchen and gave it a laid-back country look with standalone cabinets and painted furnishings

With our sons, Jack and Ryan, rapidly taking up more and more space, my husband Jim and I realised it was time to start looking for a bigger house that could become our forever home,’ says Jillian.

‘We wanted a property in a good location with the potential to extend, and I’d always fancied a freestanding kitchen, so when we spotted this place online it ticked all of the boxes. The fact that it had a large southfacing garden was the icing on the cake. It provided us with the opportunity to extend back from the rear wall without compromising on the boys’ outside space.

Just five weeks after we moved in, we started work. The kitchen had already been extended by the previous owners, but it was still quite small. The easiest and most cost-effective way to create space was to move the rear wall back three metres and remove an internal wall. Luckily, we didn’t need planning permission as the extension was within permitted development.

Building begins

Work started in October 2012 and took 11 weeks. When the foundations went in, I was worried it wasn’t big enough, but as the walls went up, I soon realised it was much larger than expected. We lived in the property throughout and staying in a dust-filled house was a challenge. Luckily, we were able to use the utility room as a makeshift kitchen, and the boys loved the fact that we had to get lots of takeaways.

Everything ran smoothly until a builder discovered a load-bearing post that was going to be costly and problematic to remove, so we ended up tweaking our plans to incorporate it. Instead, another post was fitted close by so it could become a false chimney breast for the multi-fuel