What did you indulge in at the house, what did you give up?

We didn’t have many fancy things “in the house.” But in the kitchen, we treated ourselves to a few extras that bring us joy every day:

An extra-wide oven with a 90 cm built-in size and a 62 cm tray width. Those additional 15 centimeters had been a dream of mine for a long time. Finally, two casserole dishes with lasagna. Finally, two Christmas geese. Finally, two pizzas side by side. Finally, comfortably brushing six pork knuckles... By the way, on every level with rail extensions. Otherwise, the rather heavy trays wouldn’t be manageable.

And last but not least, an additional 20*20 cm sink right next to the cooktop. Great for:
- draining pasta
- washing hands (I like to touch meat, etc. often and frequently...)
- letting food drain (without cluttering the main sink)
- filling and refilling pots with water. Thanks to the pull-out faucet with start-stop function, this can be done with one hand, without having to walk across half the kitchen.
- overflow and spills quickly and neatly disappear into the (flush-mounted) sink.

In short: I never thought a small sink could bring so much joy!

Great experience reports here


Which device do you have there?
There are apparently recirculation hoods in the higher price segment that deliver what they promise. But such a hood quickly costs 2000€.

Yes, I know, I have already looked at it, but no way would my husband allow me to buy such an expensive hood, that would be another 1/3 of the total amount of our kitchen
Besides, we only got our hood new 2 years ago, so it would be "a pity" to dispose of it so quickly.

If it is associated with less effort (financially and mess etc.), a new hood makes more sense than a core drilling or any drilling through the thermal envelope, provided of course that the result is the same. If you still have a chimney, the effort with exhaust air will be even greater. Therefore, think carefully and calculate first!

And then the expensive hood doesn’t bring the desired success and I still have to make a drilling afterwards... then I would have double costs. Just because the hood was expensive doesn’t mean I’m satisfied with the result afterwards. If I had known beforehand that the recirculation hood is no good, I would have had a core drilling done from the beginning, even if it’s elaborate. But I always had an exhaust hood before and don’t know anyone with recirculation, so I couldn’t check it out beforehand and simply naively assumed that it would also fulfill its purpose. A stupid mistake on my part, but it unfortunately can’t be undone, only max. corrected ops: We would anyway first get a cost estimate before we make a final decision. But probably not until next year; this year it’s too tight timewise for us, because if at all, we would have it done rather in the summer months. We don’t have a chimney and definitely don’t want to have one ever again. So that wouldn’t be a problem, and because of the airtight shell, there are special wall boxes that are also Blow-Door-Test qualified. And regarding dirt, we would have to repaint anyway because the ceiling and the wall above the opening of the recirculation hood is already totally dirty. For that, we would have to take down the upper cupboards anyway and would do everything in one go on that occasion.

Only extraction hoods were an option for us. However, there are supposed to be really good recirculation hoods; just search for them here or maybe you can see one live or find some tests...

Before we switched to Bora (recirculation), we had a Berbel, which always did what it was supposed to do