Due to the L-shape of the original kitchen, the fridge didn’t have a home. It sat across the room on its own looking like an afterthought. Totally impractical. So I had to give it a home…. which involved completely shifting a doorway! But that one change, created such a huge difference and much more user friendly wall.

I had work shopped the design of this kitchen time and time again. There really was no alternative but to keep the core of it in its original position, unless I wanted to add $15k to the bill. But where was the fridge going to go? The semi’s common wall was going to house floor to ceiling cupboards providing much-needed storage. So it made sense to include the fridge too. The [wo]man-trap to the roof space was also on this side of the ceiling so having the fridge underneath still allowed access.

Old doorway looking from the dining room into the kitchen with the architraves removed

BUT to accommodate the depth of the fridge, the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen needed to be moved around 70cm to the left – when looking at the picture above. The doorway was quite close to the common wall and would mean anything placed along that wall would protrude past the doorway. By moving it, it would give a clean line of sight through to the back of the house.

Remains of the original doorway

I started stripping out the remaining cabinets and splash back and removing the gyprock from the kitchen side of the wall where the door needed to be shifted across.

What I was surprised to find (but really probably shouldn’t have been) was an original doorway between the kitchen/dining.

It was fascinating trying to nut out the almost 100 year old original layout and how the original owners would have used the space.

This meant some additional but extremely minor building adaptations…

Stripping back the multitude of layers

The joys of liquid nails

When I pulled off the thick silver splash-back which had been stuck down extremely well with liquid nails, I found pale blue tiles possibly from the 50’s or 60s. They weren’t original as the kitchen used to be along the common wall. But by just adding on top of existing it provided a great insight to its design evolution.

Framework for the new doorway

My builder got stuck into the new frame-work to support the wall and create the newly shifted doorway. Finding the original door opening meant there was more work here than planned but at least I knew it had been done properly. AND, it was actually a blessing in disguise. See, where they had covered over the very original doorway (the one I discovered) there was an obvious lump on the dining room wall in the shape of a… yes, door. So this mean I could it would be fixed and gone forever.

New framework looking towards the back of the house

Almost there… Now the fridge and cupboards would be tucked neatly behind the larger wall created by moving the doorway to the left, creating a clear line of sight towards the backyard.

My builder managed to pull off the original door surrounds before he started the work so we were able to reinstate them. The dining room wall to the left of the door (below) was now one clean flat surface and all it needed was a lick of paint. You would never have known it had been moved!

Finishing touches