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Sadly, I am at work without access to my kitchen. Maybe later, if I can get it cleaned up. Or...I can show you a small portion with a photo I already have....hmmm.
rainbaby, I want your dinette set SO BAD. I used to have one almost like it but I was young and stupid and turned it into an art piece.
richat, love it! Mine is a cheap art print from Bread & Puppet and it's been in all my kitchens for the last ten years or thereabouts. It makes me feel better to look at it.
We bought our house last summer essentially without a kitchen. There was a rusty, filthy sink and not much else. We picked up some cabinets and a stove from Craigslist and a fridge from the Sears scratch-and-dent warehouse. We'd been using the grody sink until this month when I finally ripped it out and started installing the cabinets and a $100 laminate counter from Home Depot. It's almost done,this picture is a few weeks old, I just need to finish pluming the supply lines in the basement.
This only going to be a temporary solution until we can save up the money for a real professional kitchen remodel in a year or two. Everyone who visits us says "your house has so much potential!" but right now we're sort of living in a constant construction site. And we eat out a lot.
I'm moving to rainbaby's house. Forget the awesome dinette set did you see the medicine cabinets, the Hershey's ice cream sign, that lit up retro sign on the left and the retro coke clock!? I'm so there!
and now I will try and see if I have batteries for my camera somewhere..
The kitchen is What The Husband Did on his Summer Vacation last year. He knocked out the wall between the galley kitchen and the dining room, did the floor tile, and painted. We did some other stuff too. I can't believe how much I love it - I tend to Fear a Project.
The dinette set is not antique, but a reproduction. We did take the chair backs and seats off of what they came on and mounted them to antique chair frames.
I want to go on the Fruity Pebble Metachat Kitchen tour!
Rest of pics here. It's tiny, about 6ft x 8 ft, and that's from wall to wall. The floor space is about 6ft x 3ft. But it's plenty big enough for one and I've made some great feasts in my little kitchen.
The kitchen is unfinished with the upper parts of the walls still with bare plaster, and the floor with old vinyl tiles (bits of which are missing). This is because the insurers need to do some structural work to repair the building's foundations (tree roots are the culprit) which has caused some external and internal cracking. So I'm not going to pay to have it all done at my expense when it'll need to be re-done in a few months' time.
Funny, ej, I was just talking with a British friend last night about how the kitchen is the "normal" place for a clothes washing machine in England, but you would never (well, never say never, but I never have) see that in the U.S.
Also, I'm at work so I can't take photos of my kitchen for you all, but I wish I could. It's teeny tiny. 6' x 6' square. Undercounter fridge, and no stove (I use a convection/toaster oven). But I did re-tile the kitchen floor, which made me really proud of myself.
My fridge is hidden behind a cupboard door, and is undercounter, which is normal for a small UK kitchen. Big American-style fridges are becoming more popular with families though, if they have the space for them.
As most UK houses don't have basements, the kitchen is the usual place for the washing machine, or, in bigger homes, a separate utility room.
So do the British go to the supermarket more than once a week? How do you fit a weeks worth of food in a little dorm-room refrigerator? I personally hate shopping for food and don't want to do it more than I have to.
octothorpe:
We hate it too, but have a full fridge-freezer (but not a double-wide) and a small chest freezer, so it makes life a lot easier (but still in the small London flat). But I think we are actually a bit weird - we get a supermarket delivery only every three months, a meat delivery every six months and fresh fruit, veg, milk, bread etc delivery each week. It's like playing freezer and cupboard tetris when it all comes in at once.
I think it's pretty standard to keep the washer and dryer in a "laundry room" (a/k/a a utility room) in the US. Although I guess I have known some people to keep them in the basement.
octothorpe, the undercounter fridge isn't *that* much smaller than a regular fridge, I don't think. But the freezer inside it is very small, so you can't buy much frozen food if you have one.
octothorpe: when I had my kitchen installed I made a conscious decision not to have a big freezer. I have a small freezer compartment inside the fridge, big enough to store a few trays of meat (and - shoot me now - coffee beans). But I eat 95% fresh food and I shop on Wednesdays (a 'work at home' day) and at the weekend.
If I had a bigger freezer it'd be full of ice cream and pizza.
No good pictures of my current kitchen, but I did find a shot of our old one. You folks talking about small kitchens have my sympathies. Two square feet of counterspace. And we're avid cooks, too. See the toaster oven? On top of the microwave, which is on top of the fridge. Our new kitchen isn't huge, but at least we can walk through the room when the oven door is open.
mmmm, i'm going over to me3dia's kitchen to steal some supplies! ≡ Click to see image ≡
Here's mine. It's not finished but we're getting there. The floor is re-used merbau that we got from a place that sells stuff from torn down buildings. The cabinets and machines are ikea (yes there's a fridge and a dishwasher and you can see the espresso machine right above my headless body below). ≡ Click to see image ≡
Our kitchen has two windows, while most kitchens in this building only have one, making them half as wide so while ours is small it could be a lot worse. It's just kinda long, skinny - I mean we can fit a wee table! ≡ Click to see image ≡
On the to-do list, paint the end wall and doorway wood, save up and buy the black granit counter top we want and the wide expensive oven Miklas wants, plus kitchen fan. (I don't know if you can tell but the cabinets above the oven are wider than the row below. It's because the planned oven is wider, this is the old oven). Then finally put the awesome spanish superwhite tile up on both walls between the top and lower cabinets. Miklas measured and built the kitchen, my input was on the fact that I want the cabinets all the way up and spotlights are banned in any house of mine and I really really hate seeing machines (like dishwashers). I'm not much for modern but I like these cabinets as they're shiny and so easy to keep superclean, and the plexiglass handles makes it even more so. It works I think, if I had done it without Miklas input it would probably have been old style cabinets / very traditional (to go with the house) instead but I do like this a lot.
Lovely slice of life, these kitchen pictures. Thanks for sharing, folks.
Mine will be posted much later tonight or in the early A.M. They're "traditional" B&W images that I haven't copied digitally yet (like I thought I had). I'm going to campus in a bit to work on some projects and will do quick 'n' dirty digicam captures of the matted pics.
Hey, I found some before pictures of my kitchen when we bought the place - the windows, the really dicy wallpattern and very ugly cabinets, and more window.
I wanna re-see the kitchens that are about to be re-done/changed again when they're done!
Also, I wanna raid goo's four litre bottle. PARTY AT GOO'S KITCHEN EVERYONE! me3dia bring the tomato sauce, Doohickie bring the pizza, shane you're in charge of the pancakes!
My sad excuse for a kitchen right now thankfully has no real pics, nor do i have ones of nicer kitchens i've had like the big one with the vintage cutie gas stove, but i think maybe i have some of some nice 50s dishes i have, ware i like, or the remnants of a vintage dish set i mostly sold that Alton Brown uses on Good Eats.
*promises to peruse other computer later*
If only i had shots of kitchens i've worked on or helped with...
My "in-progress" kitchen. I stripped off the wallpaper, took down the fan grill to be sanded/sandblasted, and then kind of stopped. It needs a new floor and paint (if you zoom way in, you can still see some glue remnants to be removed) but I'm doing to do both of those things *real soon now*, honest.
Not the place we are currently renting in Portland, but from the two flat we own in Madison, WI. This is a picture of the second story flat, which we never lived in, but we extensively remodeled.
This kitchen, for example, had big bird yellow countertops from the 70s, with aluminum on the sides. It had yellow, red and orange floors in a pattern that still gives me nightmares, and which completely clashed with the dark green wallpaper. *shudder*
While we were renovating, we took a break from tenants so that we didn't have to be jerky landlords tearing stuff up. So after we got the kitchen done, and pulled up the carpeting in the living room, and refinished the wood floors, we had a few really awesome parties in this unit. So when I see this flat's kitchen, I think of really awesome cheeses that my friends brought, and smoked salmon and shrimp, and too much wine and gin for anyone to drink. And dancing until 5 a.m. :)
So while it wasn't a kitchen that I used for cooking much, it is a much treasured kitchen that I really loved.
Thanks, rhapsodie! It's not a big kitchen (I think the floor space is about 5' x 6') but it seemed huge after living in an RV for several years. There's a pantry in the hallway which makes it workable.
I'm really looking forward to giving it a bit of a retro look similar to rainbaby's (which I love). I want to get a similar kitchen table, but smaller and red.
goo: your Craftsman/Arts & Craft island is gorgeous.
i didn't want to bother getting out the nice vintage dishes but here's two old bad shots and a new one of the same i just got off: ≡ Click to see image ≡
Everyone's welcome dabitch! There's also gin and vodka and cointreau and wine in a box and probably some other things I shouldn't mention on the internet.
Thanks deborah. We only had about 30cm of bench space so bought the island - I have to be able to roll out pastry to be comfortable in a kitchen. The thing weighs an absolute ton though with the granite top.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
