I love old metal shelf brackets, I constantly keep an eye out at markets and car-boots, I will buy odd singles of whole bunches. They are squirrelled away in our cupboards and kept for future projects and quite frankly the more battered they are the more I like them!

I week fews ago we managed to score this collection of 40s/50s ones from a boot sale, I got the whole collection for £2.

I have been collection these cast iron greenhouse brackets for ages, I only ever seem to find them one at a time so its taken about a year to get 4! They were all picked up for 50/£1 each.

I've been hanging on to both sets with the idea of using them in the Kitchen, as we had to cut down the oak worktops quite a bit so we ended up with about 3 large off cuts, Rich cut one of these down to make three small shelves to replace the old wall cupboard.

I have done absolutely nothing to these brackets apart from sponge the dirt off, I left the flacking cream and green paint and the rust, I think they look amazing next to the oak. Not everyones cup of tea but very much mine and Rich's style!

While Rich has clutching the drill I also got him to pop up a 60s coat hook set we bought over 2 years ago, I've been waiting to find the right place for them, now they make a great place to hang my aprons.

The other white brackets I am keep for the big long shelf we want to put up over the kitchen door to store all the pans on, one of our lovely neighbours gave us two old floor boards which we need to cut down and fit but this should give us loads of storage space! Pics soon!

So last Thursday our Kitchen looked like this...

and by midday Friday it looked like this...

It was really only after we took the old worktops off we discovered quite how crappily build these units are! Ok the are the cheapest of the cheap, only put into the house to sell it by the last owners, we have lived with them for nearly 4 years and they have not stood the test of time well. They are all made of chipboard which doesn't help, meaning after a while anything screwed into it will just shred the chipboard and it will dissintergrate. Of course it doesn't help if they haven't been bodged together in the first place...

So Rich has spent the last few days rejigging them and strengthening everything up, to keep the cost down we reused the old aluminium sink as there was nothing wrong with it but we decided to flip it around so the bowl was on the other side of the drain board, this had the knock on effect of having to switch the draws around...man that was a palaver! It pretty much ended up with Rich at midnight last night still rebuilding the whole unit!

Anyway its finally done now, the hole has been cut for the sink (don't ask, that took about 6 hours to get right!) and the oak work tops are on but not attached yet.

While Rich was doing all this I finally got rid of the last of the horrid wall cupboards (donated to the same neighbour who had the last one) and stripped, filled and repainted the wall, which looks much better now.

The plan is to put up some shelves here using the oak offcuts and some lovely old brackets I picked up at a book sale a few weeks ago.

We where also planned to buy replacement doors for the units but for two reasons we now will be reusing the ones we have, firstly it appears these doors are a odd size and I cant find replacements anywhere, meaning we would have to have custom ones made which leads us to the second reason, cost! We simple don't have the budget so it looks like we will be repainting the ones we have, white hopefully with vintage handles.

Busy few days, we're both nackered now! Still, another step closer to finishing (sort of!), will be glad to be able to wash up in the sink again and not the bathtub...

Every other conversation I have at the moment seems to revolve around either our shed or our kitchen! Im not complaining, I really have no other topic of conversation as this is totally filling my head to the exclusion of all else.

Rich has managed to get the shed base completed last weekend and I placed the order for the shed last Saturday!

We still need to do a bit of landscaping and Rich is going to build a retailing wall to keep the rest of the lawn back, the ground around here is under a surprising amount of pressure (a local structural engineer assures me!), you can dig even a little way into the hill and think it's all ok until one morning you wake up and find the top 2 feet of the lawn has slide down the hill! In other words best to be safe and put these strategic little walls in!

We went for this shed in the end as it was nice and simple but with a good amount of windows to max the light in there later.

We have even gone and bought the paint for it, its going to be a nice dusky blue with cream around the windows and for the door, it will eventually look lovely, at the moment eveything still looks like a building site!

We haven't manage to got the kitchen work top fitted yet as Rich has been doing the shed base, hopefully we'll get on to that in the next week or so. I have been doing a bit of moving stuff around in there however, we've been trying to make use of stuff we already have so we don't have to buy new stuff. I've moved our little tall 50s unit from the hall next to the cooker which looks good.

Ive also been trying to make space for our little table and stools so we can eat in the kitchen eventually.

We really need some  sort of bench along the back wall on the other side of the table, we didn't have anything to fit until I thought of our Lyle Sugar chest in the living room which up until now had stored the extensive DVD collection. I spend most of yesterday emptying it (lucky they all fit in the G-plan cupboard) and moving it.

Ok, right now it looks a bit odd, bit its actually the perfect size to sit at, I might recover the top with some padding and fabric, I was also thinking of adding a separate backrest screwed to the wall to make it more cosy. The one big advantage of the chest is it gives me a huge amount of storage for the bread maker and all my big pans!

Im thinking of trying to get some of this Sanderson Fabric that I picked up at the boot-sales a few months ago, I made the off cuts into two cushions last week and just love this design, it might look good in red in the kitchen?

Little by little we're making progress!

P.S, just spotted this on Cath Kidston's website, this would look amazing in the kitchen! Excellent colours and appropriate as we have a thing for vintage clocks, am going to have to get selling some stuff on eBay to raise the pennies!