The Kitchen of Many Delights

Welcome to the Kitchen of Many Delights!  A year or so ago, the Grumpies shared a link to a tour of a single room of someone's home, and suggested it might be fun to see more of these.  The idea for a post about this kitchen has been rolling around in my brain ever since, and with a recent painting job, I think I'm finally to the place where I'm ready to share.  

The painting job I mentioned in the last paragraph?  I just painted the far wall of the kitchen to match the kitchen counters, and then I painted the door (the one that leads down into the basement) to match the wall.  Below, from left to right, you see the wall with the door open, then slowly swinging shut, and then shut (so you can't see the door at all in the right-most photo).  I love this painting job so much.  So, so much.

This kitchen is almost the smallest room in the house (the bathrooms are smaller).  From one end to the other, the room is only 10 feet long.  The walkable space is shaped like a question mark, and is 4 feet wide.  The ceilings, however, are a lofty 9 feet high.  

The layout of the space is truly odd in a number of different ways (that I'll try to describe as we tour this space): low counters on one side, an inaccessible window well on another.  Shelves that are cavernously 28" deep on one wall, and a mere 11" shallow on the other.  Triangular cupboards galore.  Tiny oven.  We inherited lots of weirdness when we moved into this space in July 2019.  All sorts of people who do professional carpentry -- people we've hired, but also relatives and friends -- scratch their heads as they tour the room, and start to suggest that we could redo the layout, but then they see the cabinets.  The cabinets are super odd in shape and location, but they're beautiful and very well made.  And so these carpentry pros scratch their heads and think about ways a body could live with the space, despite its oddities.  

Indeed, we have learned to live with (and in fact love and take advantage of) this space.  I conjecture to my friends that this kitchen was designed by people who wanted a beautiful kitchen but always ordered takeout for dinner, because aside from the cabinets, there was a lot that needed work.  The tiny, ancient oven burned half the food and left the other half undercooked, for the same meal.   The stove had no vent fan.  The aged dishwasher leaked onto the floor; the garbage disposal didn't work, and the refrigerator was (a) old, (b) too large for the space and (c) not matching. 

We moved into this house from a much bigger house (and therefore more expensive house), and a bunch of the money that came to us in this exchange went to a variety of new-home upgrades (insulation, solar panels, electrical work, and -- of course -- the kitchen).   We had a vent fan installed in the far wall, and (this next thing was more of a splurge than a necessity, but I'm glad we did it) added a small window in the southern wall, right under the vent fan.   It took a while, but we finally got all new appliances, with the exception of the stove, which is still in awesome shape (but odd for other reasons).  

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So, with those rather expensive changes now completed, let's start the tour.  We're entering the kitchen from the dining room, and to our immediate left, we see the nook for the stove.  

One of the themes that runs through my kitchen arrangement is, "hanging things".  Straight ahead, for example, you see a random strainer over a stainless steel colander that I snagged off of Freecycle (I love that colander; I think it's beautiful).  Below it is a cast-iron mold for a gingerbread house.  

I installed a piece of scavenged board under the cabinets above the stove and added heavy-duty hooks in the board to hold our cast-iron frying pans in plain sight.  One lid has its handle in the center, and so that one lid hangs like a flying saucer above the stove. 

Turn a bit further left, and you can see the stove with more hanging stuff.  I do love those cast-iron pans.  They're heavy as all-get-out, and having them hanging -- instead of on shelves -- makes it a lot easier to get at them, too.  If you turn even further to look back at the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, you can see a metal knife holder, and even more cast-iron cookware.  

Muffin pans and a tortilla press.
Through the door, you see the dining room. 
The previous owners loved gray walls.

The counter by this stove is only 30 inches high.  Your gut reaction when you walk into the kitchen and see this stove at thigh height is "maybe this was supposed to be wheelchair compliant?".  But there's no way to get into this house without clambering up and down steep stairs.  The odd height of this stove?  No idea.  I will say that having a lower stove makes it easier to get canning jars in and out of a giant canning pot, though, so I've come to appreciate that aspect. And it's not like we use the counter next to the stove for much prep work -- just 14" of counter space on the left, and 8" on the right.  Counter space is at a premium in this kitchen, for sure!

Let's open the cabinets and see what we can see.  If one of the themes of my kitchen organization is "hanging stuff", the other is "zones".  This corner of the kitchen is definitely the cooking zone.  

In the cabinets above the stove, there's a microwave oven.  Why a microwave inside the cabinet?  I have no idea, but that's where the previous owners put it, and I decided to roll with it.  Above that are pots and pans that aren't cast iron.  The cabinet to the right is for electric appliances: instant pot, crock pot, waffle iron, bread maker.   I think I mentioned, maybe, that these shelves are 28" deep, so the crockpot is behind the instant pot.  I might have also mentioned that the ceilings are 9 feet high;  I don't have pictures of these cabinets all the way up because I don't much use the top shelves. 

We have a 3-step folding step ladder, and that helps.

Under the counter and to the left, the three drawers have 

• cooking utensils
• canning jar bling (lids, funnels, grabbers, y'know)
• rolling pin and immersion blender.  

The large space under the stove itself has my husband's favorite appliance: the combo instant pot/air fryer.  And the odd, tiny, triangular cabinet has the cuisinart and all the various blades.  

Further along in the kitchen, just down from the stove is the amazing tiny oven.  This oven is so small . . . (how small is it?) . . . it's so small that I had to give away a bunch of my baking sheets when we moved here, because they don't fit inside the oven.  

(Ooh, and now you can see the door to the basement behind that, closed now). 

By the way, do you see how I have all my shelves and cabinets labeled?  I did that as a temporary thing, right after we moved, to help my husband and kids figure out my new system . . . but everyone likes the labels so much that I just left them.

 Below the oven are my baking pans: 

• rectangular pyrex (with a rectangular label),
• round pyrex (with rounded corners on the label), and
• metal baking pans.  

Above the oven are food things that are more like "food" than like "ingredients".  Granola.  Pasta.  Canned foods.

These things are are in impossibly deep 28" cabinets, and the shelves are also incredibly high.  Eh, we do what we can.  

Oh, and speaking of "can", you might see that on the bottom of those upper cabinets, I've hung the can opener from a hook.  Might as well have the can opener near the canned foods!

Beyond the oven, on the left side of the kitchen, all that remains is the door to the basement, so we can start wandering back along the right-hand side.  

We can sweep past the basket on the floor (for recycling and other objects destined for the basement) and the shallow fridge, and check out the copious counter space along the right wall.  By "copious", I mean 40" of space -- although at least it's at the standard 36" height.  So, yes, the counters on the left and right sides of the kitchen are at different heights.

This copious counter space is the "baking" zone.  You can see that I hang measuring spoons and cups, plus stirrers.  I devote valuable counter space to the flour jar and oatmeal jar (on the left side of this counter space).  To the right, we get to the "sink" zone with a black compost bin, soap dispensers, and hanging brushes.  

Above the counter, we have shallow (11"deep) cabinets for food that is like ingredients (sugar, salt, etc).  

And next to the ingredient cabinet is an even weirder, L-shaped cabinet.  I use it for my upstairs canning jars.  (Because everyone needs a special set of shelves for their upstairs canning jars, yes?)

There are usually more jars on this shelf. They like to move from the basement to come upstairs, and then to go back down to the basement again to hang out with their many friends and acquaintances down there.   They're sociable that way, canning jars are.

And below the counter space we have a new, super-quiet dishwasher next to some very skinny drawers.  I do wish I could more properly "zone" these, but since these are the only other drawers in the kitchen, I give in. 

• Knives that don't hang (ceramic knife, pizza cutters, ice cream scoop), 
• then dish rags, 
• then dish towels, 
• then spices.  

 But wait! I've been saving the weirdest thing about this kitchen for almost the last.  Because whoever decided where to put this sink in the kitchen decided, for some reason, that the sink ought to be right next to the window.  And since the bottom of the window is 20" above the floor, but the sink is 36" above the floor, the best way to put the sink next to the window in the kitchen would be . . .  to have a window well behind the sink, creating a nook that is totally unreachable, except possibly by a gymnast with extremely long arms.  

There's a plant down there, not that you can see it.  

Can you envision all the carpentry pros scratching their heads and suggesting changes?  This is what does it.  I still have no idea how somebody dreamed this up.

Beyond the sink, almost back to the dining room, we have the beverage zone, with coffee pots, electric kettle, thermos, . . .

Again, with the shelves going all they way up to the top of the 9-foot ceilings. . . 

. . . and the area below the beverage zone is an uncomfortably triangular space that we use as the food-storage zone. This includes pyrex storage containers, seldom-used stuff like aluminum foil, and bags that came with our food. 

Thus endeth the tour of the Kitchen of Many Delights.

What's missing?  You might have noticed there's no space for plates, or cups, or tableware . . . we keep all of that in the dining room.  So the kitchen is really all about cooking, and not at all about eating.  

And the dining room?  Well, that's a different tour.

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In response to a question from Frances below, here's what the hooks that hold my cast iron pans look like. They are not beautiful.  I think you can find things like this by searching for "screw hooks"; I found them by wandering aisles of the hardware store.