2.22.2017

A Happy, Golden Kitchen


From the time I first read it as a girl, I was enchanted with the passage from Laura Ingalls Wilder's These Happy Golden Years at the very end of the book where Laura describes the little pantry Almanzo had built for her. It was full of thoughtful design elements with shelving, cabinets, "drawers of different sizes" perfectly arranged for her staple ingredients. She says of these compartments, "How handy!" and I remember longing for such a handy space as this.

We've lived in this home for five years now, long enough to know how we tend to live in and use the space. We made a few significant improvements to the space along the way, most notably, removing the wall between the smallish kitchen and the dining room and adding a large peninsula and extra drawers between the two, which increased the usefulness for us for quite some time as we waited until we were able to renovate the entire space.

And, oh, what a frustrating space this proved to be! The footprint of the room seemed to consternate at every attempt to configure the space to accommodate our large family (6 children now) with its many home cooked meals, homemade breads and treats, and multiple helpers working at once. There were months of plotting and hair-pulling and brainstorming! Finally, we came up with a solution that felt just right, one that improved the space and didn't feel like we were compromising on our most desired solutions.

My own Almanzo is building this space, including all the cabinets, himself. It is coming together slowly but surely. He set up our old sink temporarily on the far wall of our dining room, which is a real blessing in what might otherwise have been months of misery without a kitchen sink. As it stands, it is just months of mild frustration as we walk the gauntlet from the still thus intact cook wall, snaking around the new cabinet boxes waiting for their permanent homed, and to the sink and wall of old cabinet storage for dishes.

In looking over some old files, it occurred to me that it has been almost a year since I posted my original kitchen design idea on the Gardenweb forums to ask for help and input! I am pretty sure I've been immersed mentally in all things kitchen ever since. Like I said, it took a lot of hair pulling and a couple of epiphanies to find the layout we ended up with. The scale of the project creeped in that time, including a small addition out onto a corner of our screened in porch to create what we named our "baking alcove," but the addition gave us a confidence in the project we'd previously faltered on and feels like exactly what we needed to do to make the space the most it could be for us long-term and still be something we can manage today.

I am excited, to say the least, and I look forward to journaling more about this and the ways this project is inspiring our home and garden life.