Kitchen Remodel

Sorry if the title was misleading...regrettably it does not reference our home kitchen but rather all two square feet of Molly's second birthday gift.  I decided quite awhile ago that I wanted to rework an existing piece of furniture into a play kitchen for Molly's second birthday.  My dad made a wonderful play kitchen from scratch (for lack of a better term) for my niece and nephew some years ago but neither Ryan nor I are inclined to start from nothing.  So I started looking and decided I wasn't going to spend more than $10 for the starter piece.  I kept my eye out for awhile and all of a sudden this fell in my lap for FREE!:

Now I hadn't even thought of remaking a play kitchen into another play kitchen but hey, half the work's already done right?  It really brought back church daycare memories of yore and, except for the split top, lack of sink and faucet, exposed nails etc., I was tempted to keep it that way for a moment.  Note: At the point of these pictures Ryan had already pried the top off and taken the oven door off the hinges so he's just holding them into place cause we forgot to take before pictures.

The first step was (for Ryan) to pry off the top, cut and attach a new one (out of a scrap of wood we already had), and cut a new, much smaller, sink hole to fit the baking pan we decided to use for the sink.  (It was between the pan and a dog bowl.  We chose the rectangle.)  Oh, and he added a board (the old sink cover) to the inside to separate the oven space from the under sink space (which you'll be able to see more clearly in some later pictures below.)

Now here's my proudest moment.  During the course of working on Molly's kitchen we ended up doing a mini project in our own kitchen.  It consisted of ripping down the scalloped border thingy over the kitchen sink...  Can you see it here?:

...and replacing the fluorescent sink light with a new fixture (I'll have to cover the after look in another post).  Anyway, after taking that piece down I thought, "hmmm, this looks about the length of M's kitchen" and surprisingly enough it was indeed a nearly perfect fit!  So, a free update to our kitchen and custom look to hers while also recycling!

Here's a picture of the part where I said it was nearly perfect:

He did have to trim the sides just a tad but it was worth it and I think it gives her kitchen a bit of charm:).  Here's Ryan roughing up the surface to get it ready for some primer, after drilling a hole for the faucet.  You can really see how he divided the cabinet space into two here.  Before there was no wall in the middle:

Speaking of the faucet, I'd been hunting for something for quite awhile and had decided to just use a letter "J" upside down with two knobs.  We'd already looked at several thrift stores, Goodwill and even the Habitat restore but everything was either too expensive or too big.  Big Lots had an $8 faucet but it wasn't the aesthetic I was going for.  One night, though, I was at Home Depot and decided to walk by and see what they had by way of bar faucets right before they closed.  I found a cute, single handled $20 one (the cheapest faucet they carried) and quickly scanned their stock in hopes of finding an open package I could use to haggle.  Indeed, there she was...an open box with the parts all strewn about and wonky packaging.  I took it to the front and asked the first person I saw if there was any way I could get a discount since it had obviously been returned and there was no telling whether everything was there or not.  "How much is it?" he asked.  "Twenty bucks" I say.  "How much do you want it to be?"  "Five".  "Done".  "What?!  Okay."  Shoulda said two.

There was a gap in my documentation of this project so just imagine a couple of pictures of Ryan and I priming and then me painting it the perfect shade of mint green.  And voila!  There you have it:

It is still sans knobs and glued-on burners.  Hobby Lobby only had 2 wooden circles in stock that were the perfect size for a burner so I'm waiting to get two more before I glue them down.  For now we're using some foam coasters.  The knobs (for the burners) on the before kitchen were on the back plate.  I'm hoping to put a little spice shelf back there so I plan to put knobs in the front where they'll be more easily accessible.

We toyed with the idea of moving the hinges on the oven to the bottom to make it open like a real oven but we were a bit worried about things lining up correctly.  Plus, if it opened down it would be harder for her to really play with and access the inside.  So, we opted for buying a more "oven-like" handle and moving it into a horizontal position from the original vertical position.  The opening for the oven window was already there but we added some plexiglass for a real deal feel.  The oven handle came in a pack of two so we used the second one as a pot rack on the side.  The under-the-sink door handle was free from a bin in the as-is section of IKEA.

Here's a close-up of the faucet:

The balance of my baking powder now resides in a ziplock bag cause the Clabber Girl can makes a way cuter utensil caddy.:

 The sink makes a great place to wash cucumbers for Carrot Cucumber Watermelon Soup.  This picture also shows a close up of the curtain's raised swiss dot pattern.:

 I found these curtains (this set plus 6 more just like it) at Park Ave. Thrift for a dollar!!!  I plan to make (read: have Mom make) her an apron and perhaps a teeny tablecloth out of some of the extra curtains.  Initially I was going to fashion a faux window for the kitchen backdrop but thought better of it when I remembered we have fourteen real ones in the playroom.  The curtain's on a tension rod so it can be taken down or moved at any time.

 As for the cook?  Well, she feels right at home!  Okay, so here she's not actually using her kitchen but she is making a sandwich which is pretty darn cute.:

Mmm, mmm.  I smell some pizza baking:

She's repurposing the orange juice as soap for now.  She kept asking me, "where's the soap?".  And the pots and pans were a b-day gift from G-ma and G-daddy.

So how do things measure up?  Well, she's all tiptoes here which just means she'll get plenty of use out of it:)!:

Yeah, I think it's safe to say that we have one happy camper, err, cooker!