When we moved into our Edwardian semi at the beginning of 2015, we knew the big job was the kitchen. Most of our friends thought we were mad: high quality cherry cabinets, granite work tops, a range oven in the fireplace and a huge utility room. But we had three big problems: the kitchen table was in the position that would originally have been the old pantry - the darkest spot in what is otherwise a lovely light house. Second, we couldn't access - or even see - our beautiful garden apart from a small and awkward back door leading to equally small and awkward steps. And our dining room was completely separate: we have a large extended family and completely missed last Christmas lunch, trekking in between rooms.

Our plan was to amalgamate the laundry and kitchen, create a new wc and utility, reinstate the pantry, create an upper terrace in the garden, bring in light via roof lights and bifolds, connect into the dining room and have enough kitchen space to seat 18. But no additional floor space apart from nicking a bit off the garage - at 2500 square foot, we had plenty of space already.

We appointed a fabulous builder and budgeted to include new boiler, electric boards, full outdoor redecoration and sorting a dodgy chimney as part of the build.

It was a sizeable project - taking off the side wall of a 5 storey house with huge chimney stacks meant a lot of steel. We had to move drains and create new cellar access and we blew our contingency and timing plan in week 2 with a missing soakaway that meant digging a tunnel through our patio and far into the garden. After doing a phenomenal deal on the kitchen units, the supplier insisted on delivery 3 months early. So at one point we were storing 3 kitchens - the temporary one, the new one and the old one (to repurpose as our new laundry room). And then the new kitchen didn't fit once the wonky old laundry room had been squared up.

Once the shell was ready, we chose a modern kitchen for great contrast in a house otherwise rammed with period features. So handle-less gloss, drawers, drawers and more drawers, neff appliances, wine cooler, induction hob, hot tap, ufh. We know we should have integrated the fridge freezer but previous experiences had put us off so we went American. We repurposed and re-used where we could, sourced matching door handles to the rest of the house and found wood effect tiles for our terrace that matched the karndean indoors.

We're not quite done – we need to sort the glass balastrade outside, new dining chairs and need to sort the dining room. But nearly there and just love it. I wanted to share before and after pics as I’ve sought inspiration and advice from Houzz all the way along – what a great forum it is!