Kitchen

I started working on the kitchen during July and finished it sometime in august. Or finished.. it is not actually really finished now. You know how it is..

The contractors had taken down the wall behind the old kitchen and towards the stairs, and moved drains, water and electricity, but I wanted to do the kitchen myself.

(note: "want" in this case can often be equated with "have to for financial reasons").

Since the house deal dragged on for ever we had a lot of time to plan the kitchen – and still you end up changing your mind last minute. Like the time we were in Ikea to buy the kitchen and we (D) decided that I would instead build most of it myself.

Since the whole top floor is one big room – kitchen, dining room and living room in one – I wanted to build a kitchen that didn’t feel too kitcheny. I wanted more soft and friendly rather than minimalistic and efficient. That is why we ended up choosing the materials we did: The cabinets are built in plywood which, besides being all the rage on Pinterest last summer, is cheap, easy to work with and doesn’t become too kitcheny (that is officially a word now). For the counters I knew I wanted linoleum. Or actually I also considered compact laminate, which isn’t as boring as it sounds, but not as cheap as it sounds either. I love the soft surface of the linoleum and it is in many ways good for kitchens since it is antibacterial. Also I could make them myself glueing desktop linoleum to plywood.

Another way of making the kitchen less kitcheny was adding the open shelves to the back of the island and using it for a mix og dinnerware and books. We have a big collection of nice mugs and I wanted to be able to show them off a bit. This also makes it easy for E to help set the table (and T, well we will see how that goes). Because the whole room has sloped ceilings I did’t want to put a lot up on the one straight wall there is so we have no high shelves or cabinets. This also means that even though this kitchen is a decent size it is not overflowing with storage room. The two benches by the window gives a little extra, but not a lot. But I’m trying to turn that in to a good thing: forcing me to be a bit more picky about what I have in there. The island gives a lot of good counter workspace and makes it easy to do stuff in the kitchen with the kids, which was something I really missed while when we lived with the (horrible) original kitchen.

Finally the sliding doors on the other part of the kitchen was another way of making it less kitcheny. I knew we weren’t gonna spend our money on a (design-wise) fancy oven or dishwasher, so instead we bought them off craigslist (or dba as it is called here) and the sliding doors then let us hide all those different fronts and create a more calm look. For the whole renovation we actually tried to buy as much as possible off craigslist; The oven was unused, best in test and almost half price. Since I was making everything myself I also took the chance to make that counter extra deep, which makes it less crowded to have things on the counter while also using it as a work surface and it gives extra storrage under the sink.

The drawers are all Ikea bases – We bought the drawers and cabinet and the cut the fronts and sides ourselves.

I am not a big fan of our fridge, but it works quite well and I don’t want to spend money on a fancy design for that right now. The plan is to possibly build something around it to hide it a bit … perhaps. The same goes for the washer/drier; the next thing I am gonna build is a door in front of it. Over the washer/drier is my coffee corner that perfectly fits my Nuova Simonelli Oscar and my grinder (but because of the sloped ceilings, no tall person can make coffee there :-)).

There it is. I’m still loving the kitchen – and the rest of our house and I am happy to finally share some more photos with you guys. I will do another one with some more detail shots, but let me know if you have any questions about it!