Kitchen Compromise

Hello, hope everyone has had a good day. The weather here has definitely been

cooler today but I'm not complaining. It's still dried all the washing and Jarvis has been able to have a longer walk earlier in the day so it's all good. 

I spoke yesterday about not being able to purchase a new kitchen when the money had to be redirected to pay for a hefty vets bill. I also said that when you get these obstacles or "spanners in the works" then you just have to deal with them, move forward and don't let them put you off track. You have to be resourceful and think outside the box. With this in mind, I remembered that I'd seen some ideas on Pinterest when I was originally looking for inspiration for small cottage kitchens. One of these involved taking away the wall cabinets and replacing them with shelves to open up the room. I am lucky to have a dining room with storage and I also cook everything from scratch so buy mostly fresh ingredients that can be refrigerated. 

I saw some shelves that looked rustic and would give character to the kitchen. I thought that they were just oak but when I went to investigate at our local timber yard, I realised that they were reclaimed scaffold boards. I went to a reclaimers yard and looked at their scaffold boards but they had been left out in all weathers and were a little bit too battered and weather worn and some had huge splits in. I wanted rustic but not that rustic! 

As it turns out, our daughter's partner's family own a scaffolding company so we asked them if we could buy some newish boards from them. They were brilliant and gave them to us free of charge and even delivered them to our house. Hubby spent quite a while cutting them to size, sanding them down and oiling them. He then got some of the metal bands that go onto the ends of the boards, painted them black and tacked a few back on. We bought brackets that again had to be painted as we couldn't find any ready done at the right price. We had to plaster a few holes in the walls where the cupboards had been - the joys of old houses! The kitchen was painted, the solid oak worktops that we already had were sanded and oiled and my brother made me two chopping boards/butchers blocks from a spare piece of worktop that we had in the shed. It cost approximately £100 to do everything and it really gave the kitchen a lift and made it look much bigger and lighter. We kept the original base units which I think were from Ikea and were in situ when we moved in. So all's well that ends well, we still had Jarvis and a newish kitchen of sorts too. Has anyone else had to make a compromise or maybe decided against a big purchase and gone for a cheaper option opting to do the work themselves?

Have this set and two more sets of three each side of the cooker.

I will try to read all comments and reply. Please be polite and kind. Thanks :)