Making a decent kitchen better

To say our kitchen in the old apartment was small would be an understatement. The kitchen was minuscule.The stove/oven range wasn't even full sized. It was more like a child's toy stove. My nice baking sheets barely fit inside unless I rigged them up so that the pan sat nestled in the indented grooves along the sides of the oven intended for the rack. It would sit there baking and hanging precariously a few inches above the wire rack.

The fact that the kitchen had a dishwasher was just a bad joke, because the space that half-sized thing took up could have easily been a much needed cabinet. There was no pantry, so one of the very few cabinets was used as a pantry which meant most of the dishes, appliances, and utensils I had sat in boxes around the apartment high on shelves, out of reach, collecting dust. Don't get me wrong. Despite it's size I was still able to cook and bake many wonderful meals in there, just with a bit of finagling.

Wanda whipping up a dinner in the new kitchen.

Naturally, when we started looking at houses last fall, I was blinded by any kitchen bigger than a shoe box. And when we closed on and moved in to this house, I carefully (and quite easily) found a place in the cabinets for every dish, pan, utensil, and small appliance. It's funny how quickly the shiny new exterior can wear off.

First, it was that blasted florescent light, which only made me feel like I was cooking in my office at work every evening. Next there was the fact that everything was white - floors, cabinets, walls, blinds. And then, in stark contrast but not in a good way, were dark green countertops. But the kitchen was never really a priority for us - we needed a bedroom, a living room, a sofa.

Now that those things are mostly taken care of, we've finally gotten around to it. We painted the walls a cheerful orange to break up the white monotony. We got brown shutters and green curtains for the two windows. And we finally got rid of that hideous florescent light. Now the kitchen feels warm, cozy, and inviting. We have a few things we still want to change - like the back door and buying a butcher block to push up against the empty wall. But it's finally at a point where I want to share it. It's a kitchen I'm happy to cook in, and that means everything.