The kitchen is considered to be the heart of the home, and I think that is for good reason. Food feeds the soul in addition to the body, and people gather where the food is, for warmth and community.
Last week I wrote about our kitchen table, which I love. That kitchen table takes up one end of our Very Small kitchen in our co-op home in East Van. I love that table. I really do.
But I don’t love that its current parking spot is oh so very … cozy.
I do love small spaces, and have a passion for making them work. But. But. But I wish that I could wave a magic wand and re-allocate the small space that we do have. I’d erase a bedroom, make one smaller and the other one taller. I’d get rid of an entire floor in favour of stretching out the main floor. We spend almost all of our time on the first floor of our three-level home, which is about 1,000 square feet total (stairwells included).
And the kitchen is perhaps the most unfortunate victim of space-allotment. The condo was clearly built for a family, but whoever designed the kitchen either couldn’t make it more open or spacious, or simply didn’t, for whatever reason.
Poor Jack. She’s a chef after all, and in all of the homes we’ve lived in, she’s never had a generously-sized kitchen. We adore small homes, but do wish that we could sacrifice bedroom space for a wee bit more elbow room in the kitchen. Especially because our kids love to help us cook. And because we’re home with the kids, we cook a lot. Three meals a day, plus snacks. All from scratch, for the most part. That is a LOT of kitchen action.
We only have room for one stool in the kitchen, and it used to be Esmé’s, without challenge. She’s being a very good sport (mostly) about sharing it with Hawk now that he wants in on the fun too. He started out by climbing up after her and hugging her from behind and squawking until she handed him a piece of apple or slice of this or that. Now, though, he wants in on the real deal.
What you see in these pictures is the kitchen in its entirety, save for the stove just out of the picture to Hawk’s right. What you also see is a large reason to put an emphasis on sharing and cooperating from infancy. There’s just no where else to go. Everyone ends up in the kitchen, whether there is space to be or not. And clearly, space isn’t actually required. Just determination and a willingness to be cheek-by-jowl. We love living in close quarters, and is the main reason why we could do without our second floor altogether (except for the bathroom), but we would dearly love to pluck up one of the bedrooms and tack its square footage onto our kitchen.
(I found a photo from Christimas that gives a good idea of the lay of the land. A small pass-through window in a wall that closes off the kitchen from the living room, and then the other end of the space, where our table is.)
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i have a *teeny tiny* kitchen but on purpose — it’s built into one corner of my main floor and looks out on the rest of the room — living room in one direction, eating nook in the other. so i guess i have borrowed space visually. i do love cooking in it (no steps) but oh my now that the boys are teens — it really doesn’t hold *two* people let alone more!
I love teeny tiny! And I might love ours if it looked out onto our living space. I like the borrowing space visually … that goes a long way. No such luck here. I cannot even begin to imagine teenagers in our kitchen! Eek!
Ahhhh Vancouver. When we re-located out to the ‘burbs and were seeing kitchens, we were surprised at “how spacious” they seemed. And then we moved into one of these “spacious kitchens” and started trying to put stuff away. My wife (who is also a chef, but no longer cooks professionally, although she retains her love of food and dinner parties and the likes) is convinced that the kitchens that are built now are not meant for the kind of scrap-to-finished food that we engage in. Our kitchen layout works, and I love that our 1000sq ft of space is all on one level and that our kitchen is open to the main living areas (dining, living and den/future play room). Our kitchen lacks adequate storage area for the amount of base ingredients we own and use on a regular basis, or any larger sized small appliance (our mixer and food processor). It seems to be meant for a lot of pre-prepared sauces and things like that, and consequently we have a baker’s rack stuffed to the brim with stuff and another cupboard which contains all of our baking ingredients and whatever else doesn’t fit in the kitchen cupboards. And the shelves don’t fit plates (WHAT??!).
Isn’t that interesting! It’s true that our kitchen does work, it just doesn’t work with more than one person in it. But we do most of our cooking from scratch, so our stores deplete on a regular basis, and there isn’t much need for a lot of dry storage, or place to put lots of boxes and cans, etc. And how bizarre about the plates!?!