Project Kitchen: Heating Up

One of the things we kind of overlooked when planning our kitchen was heating it. It’s easy to get carried away in picking kitchen units complete with pan drawers and magic corner (whit-whoo), worktops, taps etc. Radiators kind of don’t enter that thought process.
Knocking through three rooms to create a large kitchen dining space meant losing existing radiators. One was on the old dividing kitchen/dining room wall and the other two were smaller radiators behind what was the utility room door and the kitchen door. Looking at what space we would have we didn’t have too many options as to where to place radiators. We did toy with the idea of underfloor heating, but we’d heard too many stories of the heating breaking and then you’re stuck with either broken heating or the job of ripping up the floor and possibly the kitchen to sort it.

So we decided to stick with a radiator and to make a feature of it. For the size of the room I knew we’d need something pretty large but I’ve never been that taken with modern upright radiators. I love the old school style radiators and one of my best friends has a low level one of these in her kitchen which looks really nice. A quick google search and I came across Best Heating and instantly found a large radiator I liked the look of.

I admit I didn’t know much about radiators other than they heat the room but every radiator has a BTU rating which- boring fact alert, stands for British Thermal Unit but basically quantifies how much heat it will provide. A quick measure of our space told me what BTU we needed and I went for one higher than necessary to make sure the room is well heated in the winter.

We chose the Milano Windsor radiator and it arrived quickly which was handy as we weren’t sure at what point the builders would be ready to install it. Luckily Mr J was home the day it was going in so he could quickly paint the wall behind, which is lucky as the radiator is really heavy, so much so even Mr J struggled to carry it, and it needed to be secured with chemical fixings, so it won’t be moving.

Being July I can’t comment on the heating capacity of the radiator but it certainly looks really good in our kitchen and so much better than a standard radiator. I’m also pretty sure finishing painting the wall and skirting boards will complete the look.