Tour of the Piss-Ant Kitchen

Welcome to the tour of the Piss-Ant kitchen.

Back when it was first built, our building was a one-family house. It has since been chopped up into 8 apartments. The house is pretty big, but clearly the process of chopping it up led to some interesting design decisions... like our kitchen.

As our kitchen was designed and laid out, it was lacking in a few basic things,  like adequate storage for pots and pans, and a space to actually prepare food. And the layout leaves very little room, making it impossible for two people to cook at one time in here, or even just move past each other without invading personal space*. But I'm going to try to squeeze the both of us (you, the reader, and me, the author) through here for the tour. Apologies for some of the photos... I'm not a professional photographer by any means, and there's not much room to back up and get a decent shot.

So, this is it. It's long, and skinny. It's basically a hallway running between our bedroom and our dining room. At the dining room end of the kitchen is a small refrigerator. There really isn't room for a full-sized one, so it works, more or less, with the space that we have.

As you enter from the bedroom, the sink is immediately on the left, followed by a column of cabinets. Following that is a shallow set of over/under cabinets, with a shelf that's dressed up to look like a counter, but is only deep enough for the microwave and coffee maker.

Once you get past the cabinets and shelf, there's a stove/oven unit. It's not the greatest stove, and the elements aren't very flat, but it works. Next to that is the door into the dining room.
So that's the kitchen, as we received it when we moved in.

The most egregious thing that was missing was space to work. Thankfully, I have an old kitchen island that I built 7 years ago. (it's showing it's age, too... I want to build a new one.) so that was installed right next to the fridge. I say installed, but it's actually on wheels, so it can be moved out of the way for cleaning.

The other major problem this kitchen had was that the cabinets aren't very deep, except for the one under the sink, so storing pots and pans would have been a nightmare. Luckily, I already had this pair of hanging pot-racks. The linear design of these racks means they don't really intrude much into the main area of the kitchen. They're also available in various lengths. That's useful, and it's one of the reasons I chose to buy them for my last kitchen. All that said, they're really only a viable solution if you have high ceilings like I do.

Oh, and that's not a monkey up in the corner. It's an old toy Rancor monster that I got when I was a kid. I didn't have a better place for him, so I let him hang out in the kitchen. Yes, I'm a Star Wars fan.

Last but not least, there's the magnetic knife holder that I installed to the left of the stove. It looks a little empty to me right now, because we're going through one of those "we have too much stuff," periods. We do have too much stuff. And there were a couple of very nice knives that I never used, so I'm putting them up on eBay, since I can use the money more than I can use extra stuff. As far as the knife holder itself goes, it was a deliberate choice: I also have a very nice bamboo block that used to hold the collection. I have no real counter space to spare though, so a wall mounted unit made more sense.

If you look up, you'll see there's some space to pile stuff up on top of the cabinets. I'm 5'9", and I can pretty much reach up there. But for big stuff it's a stretch. Among other things, I keep my crock pot up there, as well as the stereo speakers, one of which you can see here. If I were taller, or had the space in this kitchen to use or store a step-ladder, this added storage might be more useful.

And that spits us out into the dining room.

This concludes the ten cent tour of the Piss-Ant kitchen.

-James

*Re: Personal Space: We're engaged newly married, so invading personal space is actually a hobby for me.