Workin' With Whatcha Got

You may be wondering how we've managed to live for one year and four months with no kitchen...well, we haven't.  As our house was once a duplex, one of the bedrooms upstairs had been converted to a kitchen.  When we first toured the house the room was empty, but the plumbing was still roughed in

bringing sexy back over here!

You can see on the floor and wall where the cabinets used to be.  Luckily by the time we moved in the previous owners had at least painted the walls...

The floors are in r-o-u-g-h shape, you can see the square outlines from where they must have put down some peel 'n stick vinyl or something, and all of the dark spots are from water damage...think we'll have any luck refinishing them??

So when we decided to blow out our kitchen downstairs, we knew we'd have to make some temporary space upstairs to get by.  We knew we'd have to get creative too - we didn't want to be spending any money on a temporary kitchen.  And spend zero money we did!  Here's how...

Darryl built a basic counter base with scrap wood he had.  Our neighbour next door was renovating her house too, turning it into student housing, and when we saw her throwing an entire countertop and sink to the curb, we pounced. 

We knew we'd be able to survive without cabinets for however long we'd need to.  I packed up a lot of kitchen stuff that we wouldn't need or be able to use.  With no oven there wouldn't be any baking going down, so I put away our baking supplies (cookie sheets, pans, mixing bowls...)  My aunt was getting rid of an entertainment unit that we scooped up and used as temporary housing for our cups, dishes, cutting boards and tupperware. 

The room used to house a twin bed and a desk.  After moving our entire main floor into storage in the loft and mudroom, where were we supposed to fit more furniture!?  So we decided to work with what we had.  We pushed the bed up on one end, against the wall, not knowing that underneath held our future pantry all along!

See, the mattress and cherry sheets are still on the bed!

We decided to turn the desk into the cooking area where we would house our rice cooker, hot plate, toaster oven and kettle.

Because the floors were so sticky/tacky/impossibly dirty, we reused the laminate flooring from the main floor kitchen and just put enough down to keep our feet off the nast.

We couldn't fit our fridge upstairs so we used a bar fridge borrowed from family.  Very quickly we realized that this would not be nearly enough space, so we went and picked up my university bar fridge from my cousin who was finished borrowing it from me.  Propped up on a recycling box and some bins that housed our "not needed" kitchen tools, they were the perfect height.

Yes that is a wall half torn down behind the fridges, no biggie...we'll get to it...  :s

We carried our second hand dishwasher up the stairs and that was really all we ever needed to make the year go by much easier!



If this isn't called working with what you've got, I don't know what is!  This kitchen has done us well for the last year (it's been surprisingly easy to cook using mainly a skillet and a hot plate), regardless of how unglamourous it is, but boy am I an eager beaver to get into our new kitchen downstairs!

Have you had to get creative using just what you've already had on had?