The Plan for our Kitchen--Use of Space

The Storage

Our kitchen is a busy place and some days I am in it from the time we get up until the time we got to bed, leaving only to change diapers and use the bathroom. So, getting this room organized well was a top priority when we moved in since it affects my life more than any other part of the house.

Even though our kitchen is a pretty good size, the space was not being used very well:

  The kitchen felt like it was overflowing with kitchen gadgets:

There was no space to do any prep work:

The kitchen was used for several purposes that all were not being accommodated for:

All of this made it impractical to eat in the kitchen nook because I often found myself resorting to using the space in the nook to stash kitchen stuff and prepare food there:

So, by the time food was actually prepared we tended to eat in the living room just so we had somewhere to sit down to eat:

*Picture not available because the living room isn't much cleaner than the kitchen*

First we took stock of what we wanted to use the kitchen for:

*Baking and cooking

*Making coffee, teas and toast

*Storing dishes, pots, pans, lids, cutlery, Tupperware, coffee cups, dry goods, etc.

*Eating 

*Storing fresh herbs in our greenhouse that had been stored on the porch all winter due to lack of space

*Kenneling our dogs

*Providing water for the two cats and two dogs

*Providing a safe place for the baby to play while we cook

*Looking good/showing off our cool kitchen stuff

Although we identified what we needed our kitchen to do, I am not a spatial person so I really struggled with how to store all of this. 

Making coffee, teas and toast.  Eating.  Baking and cooking.

I knew I needed to clear off the counters so I had somewhere to prep for cooking and baking and so I could have the nook free to eat at.  I also knew in the nook area I wanted easy access to the coffee maker, toaster, kettle and tea cups.  We talked about installing a shelf above the nook to keep the baby away from the dangerous hot temperatures of these items, but couldn't figure out how to make that work without disrupting the seating area.  Finally one night when I couldn't sleep I grabbed the table the toaster oven was on, and slid it over to the wall next to the nook.  I moved the appliances onto the table and put the toaster oven where the appliances had been.  This worked well because it helped hide the recycle and compost bins that were on that wall, the appliances on the table were tall and fit on the table better, and the toaster oven took a lot less counter space. 

Storing dishes, pots, pans, lids, cutlery, Tupperware, coffee cups, dry goods, etc.  Storing fresh herbs in our greenhouse that had been stored on the porch all winter due to lack of space.

I knew if I could move the extra shelf out of the kitchen, that would give me a space to bring in our greenhouse so I could grow the fresh herb I'd wanted to have in the kitchen for years.  I wanted to move one of the two storage shelves downstairs to the guest room to store the baby stuff until I get knocked up again, but needed a better way to store the pans that were on that shelf and I knew I wanted some kind of pan rack. 

We looked online at pan racks and saw they were hella expensive.  Also, most of them didn't hold enough pans.  The racks that hung from the ceiling were impractical with our low ceilings, and we couldn't find anywhere to hang them from the ceiling that they wouldn't be in the way.  A friend of ours hung his pans on his wall, which we really liked that but weren't sure how to do that in our kitchen. 

We went to Menards and tried looking for a towel rack to use S-hooks to hang the pans on.   We couldn't find a towel rack that looked like it could look "right" as a pan rack, so I thought maybe we could hang pans off of those wirey shelves you normally use in a closet.  Jason was not super on board with this, but he humored me.  We looked at the wire shelves, then went to the hooks. 

We could not find a hook that would hook onto the wire shelf and hold our pans.  My obvious choice was a "S" hook, but the "S"s that were wide enough were too fat.  The "S"s that were thin enough were too narrow.  Then we saw the pegboard hooks.

Now, to be fair, Jason had suggested using pegboard in the kitchen months ago, but I had envisioned pegboard that looked like the brown, crumbley, unpainted stuff hanging in our garage.  I had adamantly vetoed this and insisted it would look stupid.  However, the pegboard hooks were the exact size I wanted to hang the pans and I was feel desperate that we would never find anything.  Then I saw the coolest pegboard I'd ever seen:

It was diamond!  And I was desperate.  So I thought, "What the hell, Jason might be right."  So we got the biggest piece of diamond pegboard they sold and brought it home.  We didn't know how it would look, but we figured if we hated it we could either take it back or use it for storage in the garage.    

We hadn't put the final coat of paint on the walls yet, but we hung it up when we first got home just to see how it would look.  And it looked SO good.  And I trial-hung some pans on it, and it was amazing how well it worked.  I was totally stoked! 

And I was convinced my husband was the smartest man in the world.  I searched Pinterest to see if anyone else was as smart as my husband, and there were a few results of people who had used pegboard in their kitchens.  In fact, some of them had taken the gross, ugly brown pegboard we had in our garage and painted it in fun, cool colors that really made their kitchen look cool!  And as I looked through all of the ways people used pegboard on Pinterst, I realized I needed a lot more pegboard.

As it turns out, Julia Child used pegboard in her kitchen and recommended it.  Well, I am not Julia Child, but if she can do it without feeling like a weirdo, I was all about it.  I just needed someone to say it was not weird. 

So I drug poor Jason back to the store and bought about a million more sheets of the (much less expensive!) brown pegboard.  We bought two giant sheets of it to hang on the walls, and I regulated the diamond pegboard to behind the door to hold the brooms and cleaning supplies. 

I also bought some smaller sheets of perboard to use as a backsplash to hold all of the gadgets we use when we cook so I wouldn't have to dig through all of the drawers to find a spatula.  Although not as pretty as the tile backsplash we'd bought, it was much, much more practical.  And in the end, thats the most important thing when it comes to a kitchen, and it was easy to return the tile.

Kenneling our dogs.  Providing water for the two cats and two dogs.

I knew I needed a quiet, out of the way space to kennel the dogs.  I wanted the dogs to feel safe and I didn't want them to add to the chaos our kitchen sometimes falls into.  I knew the pet water bowl needed to be easily available to all of the animals and near an outlet for the water pump.  I learned not to put the water bowl next to the kennel because it makes the cats scared to use it.  I provided water for the cats near their food bowl, water for the dogs in their kennel, and a community water bowl away from any of the animals' "territories."  I moved the dogs away from the door and I am hoping we will eventually install a counter over the kennels.  We have wire kennel which make travel easy, but the wire kennels don't give as good of a "den" feeling and I know the dogs like to be under things because they hang out under the nook and the coffee table when they aren't in their kennels.  So some day we will get rid of the microwave cart, put a counter in over the kennels, put the microwave on the counter and the dogs will feel safe and snug.

Looking good/showing off our cool kitchen stuff

I knew I wanted to find a way to show off my Fiestaware.  When we were looking for kitchen colors, I came across a neat kitchen.  While I was looking at this kitchen, I really fell in love with the open shelving they got from taking the doors off of the cupboards, so I thought I might try that on the cabinet that has my dishes in it.  I really love my Fiestaware and I thought open shelving would help me to show it off.

Open shelving

Providing a safe place for the baby to play while we cook

With all of this, I had to keep in mind that I couldn't store anything even remotely dangerous in our bottom cupboards or anywhere within reach of my daughter, which was very limiting.  I am a big fan on the Montessori principal of having kids do as much as they can as early as they can, so one of our lower cupboards is devoted to the baby's stuff so she can open the door and help herself to food she wants, her cups, her dishes, and her silverware.  In the other cupboards I have mixing bowls and other things she can safely play with to make drums out of or sort things in.

Read my "Making it Happen" blogs to see how we fixed our storage problems.

The Plan for our kitchen--the colors

Jason and I needed to decide on a color scheme for our kitchen.  It had to match our black appliances, black countertop, and red stand mixer and blender.

I

Picture of a kitchen we saw while house hunting and loved.  This was our inspiration.

What this picture doesn't show is the super cute formica table they used to stage the house.  

So, using this as a jumping off point, we knew we wanted a "red kitchen."  However, since red can be such an overwhelming color, we didn't want our kitchen to look tacky.  (Or at least tacky in a way that was pleasing to us)

We also have hardwood floors, which I absolutely love and were a huge selling point of the house, so we are keeping those.

Our "before" kitchen

I googled "red kitchen" and started pouring through tons of search results.  It was tricky because just black and red was a little too 80s-sounding to me (I'm sure it could look great with the right combination) and it was a little too dark.  Since there is already some white in the kitchen, I narrowed my search to kitchens with black, white, and red as the main colors. 

The problem with those colors was I thought red walls would overwhelm the kitchen, I'm too old-and-not-goth for black walls, and white walls in a kitchen sound boring and would show all of the dirt.  So I was going to need one more color in my kitchen.  I wanted this color to seem neutral though and help the red to stand out, rather than compete with the red. 

After a lot of searching, I found the perfect kitchen on the Better Homes and Gardens Website:

First kitchen color scheme I wanted. 

http://www.bhg.com/kitchen/color-schemes/inspiration/red-kitchen-design-ideas/?rb=Y#page=2

I showed it to Jason and he said he liked it.  Then he scrolled through the other pictures on the same website and found one he ACTUALLY liked:

Kitchen color scheme Jason and I both liked.

http://www.bhg.com/kitchen/color-schemes/inspiration/red-kitchen-design-ideas/?rb=Y#page=4

He confessed that the one I liked he was just faking enthusiasm for, but THIS one was perfect.  I liked this one too.  I liked how the green didn't overwhelm the kitchen, and the red still really popped, but there wasn't so much red that it looked like a blood bath.  So we agreed on this color scheme, but these tiles were not the right fit for our backsplash. 

We went to Menards and looked at backsplash options for a really long time.  I found an awesome backsplash I loved.  We bought it and I came home and googled for "red kitchen with black and white backsplash."  I found this, which was pretty much the same colors and exactly the same backsplash we had planned:

A kitchen with a similar color scheme and the same tile backsplash we bought.

Extreme close-up of the tile.

http://www.hgtvremodels.com/kitchens/a-kitchen-crafted-for-the-eco-friendly/index.html

So this was our common vision of the colors we wanted to see in our kitchen.

Please excuse the brevity of this post, it was PERFECT and somehow the perfect draft got erased and I had to rewrite it...twice...

The "Before" Pictures

When we bought our dream house last July, we talked about doing lots of things with the house--eventually.   

We  are now getting to a point where we are mostly unpacked, and doing something small around the house is a possibility. Jason used to be a professional painter, so I know he has been itching to repaint the very-amateurish paint job the previous owners did all over the house.  

However, we once watched a show on HGTV where the owners stripped their whole house down to remodel, then ran out of money and had to live in that indefinitely.  I KNOW I don't want to make that mistake, so I really want to focus on one room at a time.  I've read from multiple sources that the kitchen and the bathroom get the most "bang for their buck" when it comes to remodels that increase the value of a home (Which makes sense because they are also the most expensive rooms to remodel!) and after we visited friends who had recently remodeled a bathroom and saw how much work goes into a bathroom remodel, the kitchen made the most sense to start with, especially since I spend so much of my time there.

Right now the kitchen is functional, but bland.  All of the appliancesaere adequate, except the damn oven which takes FOREVER to reach temperature, and all of the appliances are the same color (black):

      

What the kitchen looked like before we moved in.

It is a fine kitchen, plenty of room and lots of potential, but it is boring and does not suit our personalities.

As you can see, the walls are a horrible mauve-y 80s awfulness that made me want to claws my eyes out of my head every time I saw it.

The company that staged the house used this bizarre choice for a table.  The table was in the corner of the room you can't see to the right of the top picture.:

This picture also helps show the mauve-y awfulness of the walls.

From the moment I saw this house, I wanted to buy it.  And from the moment I saw this corner of our eat-in kitchen, I knew it needed a nook.  So after we moved in, I badgered my poor husband to let me get a nook, even though he was very opposed to it.  I found one on Craigslist for under $100, and just like that we had a nook:

Try to ignore the sweet potato that has sprouted and now grows in our hanging basket.

My husband has learned to live with the nook, and I haven't killed the dogs for EATING my nook (they are puppies so they are teething on everything), so this is what that corner looks like now.  I know, your next question must be, "Where can I learn to keep a house that clean?" But that is a blog for another time.

Now that we are unpacked and the home stagers have gone back to wherever they came from, this is what our kitchen looks like when its actually in use:

A place for everything, and everything in its place.

And obviously we do not have enough storage space, even though we also have these to help with storing all of our kitchenry:

Yes, those are my husband's practice swords. 

Doesn't everyone store their practice swords in the kitchen?

And this was still not enough space for storing all of our crap, so we added a pantry, a microwave cart, two dog kennels, and a table to the previously too-empty-to-bother-photographing-before-moving-in wall:

After we moved in.

So since we've been living here for six months, we felt like we knew the space well enough to start making some more permanent decisions about organizing, decorating and using the space.  I also spend most of my days in the kitchen, and having the walls a color I hate is not a huge motivator to go cook.  The next thing we have to do is plan the kitchen (That blog is coming soon!)