My teeny, tiny updated 1959 kitchen (pic heavy)

[DebJ]

15. Cute, cozy, 'feels-like-home look! I love your pennies! And finally, I have met someone who has

an even smaller kitchen than I do! It's so nice to see the pleasant results of a remodel that is in a TRULY small space and with a reasonable budget/expenditure.

A few years ago, I was watching home remodeling TV shows quite often, including one called "Kitchen Impossible". (At the time, I had hopes of remodeling ours in the near future, until the economy and my husband's health collapsed, and deferred that goal to maybe 'pipe dream' status, as we are now retired.) But show after show after show, the first thing I would see is a kitchen as large as half my living room, plus all of my dining area and kitchen combined, and all I could say is "WHAT is impossible about that?" You can do almost anything with rooms the size that they work with! And the rooms were always squarish-shaped also, and almost always, had beginning floor plans that made some sense. I saw one show where an outside door was converted to a window, but other than that, they didn't do much else, except install wonderful island work spaces, update sinks and appliances and the floor, put in beautiful, generous size counters and a pretty backsplash, and maybe relocate the refrigerator into one of maybe 4 or 5 possible options.... Big deal! What 'challenge' was there in that? I'm always seeing the same kind of stuff on Houzz "how to remodel your small bathroom".... SMALL? Some of these so-called 'small' bathrooms are large enough to be a small office or small bedroom! If you are a one per-center, I guess they are 'small'.... my daughter's master bathroom has more square feet than either of my two larger bedrooms....

Since I can't afford to remodel my kitchen, I will have a good laugh about the utter idiocy of the person who 'designed' it back in 1954. Clearly, this person was not a chef. In fact, I think the primary concept in mind was "I need a place to grab a beer and a bag of pretzels for Sunday football, and to boil water for a cup of tea in the morning'. In fact, this house was built by, and lived in by, just one set of owners in all of its 52 years before we moved here, by a professional childless couple who, judging from the condition of the 1963 electric oven when we purchased the home in 2006, rarely did more than grab a beer or a cup of tea. The stove and oven were spotless...but the oven caught fire nonetheless a few years ago, the wiring having become brittle simply from time, not from use. An elderly neighbor said they rarely ate at home, ever.

My daughter says I don't have a kitchen, I have a hallway with appliances, and she is right. It's not really rectangular, either. You have to consider it to be sort of two sections. The larger end is 9 ft wide and about 9 feet long, leaving only about three feet between the sink side of the kitchen and the stove/oven side. There is so little room between the small counter/cabinet area and the fridge, that the fridge door can't even open all the way,and when open, blocks access to the dining room door while it is jammed into the wood of the 'cabinets'. I actually have to unplug the fridge and shove it into another area of the kitchen, squeezing it past the cabinets and past the oven, in order to remove the shelves to clean them. (Until I get a double-door model). This 9x9 space has a door to the dining room on one wall, and another door to the kitchen on an adjoining wall, and that door swings INTO the kitchen to take up more space that isn't there to be taken. If the dishwasher door is open, and you need to check something in the oven, opening the oven door would leave no room for you to stand between the two open doors and look inside the oven, unless you stand to the side of the oven, in front of the door to the living room, to peer in sideways. The fridge is next to the oven/stove (with no counter space in between or anywhere on that side of the kitchen, no room), which means oven cooking puts pressure on the fridge and freezer to keep things cool. Smart, huh? If you never cook, it's okay.

The other end of the kitchen is 6 feet long and 5 ft wide, and that area has 3 doorways (basement, bathroom, and to the outdoors), a large window that begins 3 ft up from the floor and extends up almost to the ceiling, plus a small pantry door (about 18" wide). 6' x 6' x 5 x 5' equals 22 linear feet, completely taken up by four doors and a window, except for mere inches here and there, and three linear feet next to the bathroom door. The only useable floor and wall space there will hold no more than something the size of the small freezer chest we have under the window now. Accessing the freezer chest is problematic as my husband is frequently passing through either the basement door (so he smacks me in the back with the door when he comes up the stairs and I'm digging in the freezer), or through the door there to the bathroom (which is also a thru way with a door on the other side of the bathroom to the bedroom...and the bedroom, of course, also has on another wall yet another door to the central hall, because you just can't have enough doorways in a home now, can you? Yes you can!). Both the basement door and the door to the backyard open inward to the kitchen, as does the door to the living room, because when you are working in such a small space, it's great to have to set aside some of that small space for so many doors to swing into that area where you are trying to work with sharp knives and burning, steaming hot food and hot liquid items! Oh, and the door to the backyard does not line up with the door to the basement, so attempting to carry large items from the outside of the house into the basement is a bit of a trick to accomplish by angling and jostling and maneuvering about, as are the alternatives of squeezing a large item through the dining room and kitchen, or else entering through the living room door and then making a 180 degree turn in a very small space so as to try to access the basement door. Pure genius at work in the floor plan!

The 'cabinets' are like yours: wood planks put up on the wall as shelving and then some doors stuck over them and sides placed on the wall... no back to the cabinets, just the wall there... which apparently was last painted with semi-gloss in the year the house was built... Something I didn't expect in a 1950s brick home in a suburb... a 100 year old farmhouse maybe, but not an all brick suburban home in the 50s....was that a common thing back then, though? I was born in the mid-1950s and so wasn't paying a lot of attention to cabinet construction back then, LOL. The house has relatively low ceilings, and yet the morons took up what little space there is in this kitchen by putting in false fronts that are 12 inches tall above the wall cabinets, extending up to the ceiling, to make things look and feel even more closed in, and to render completely useless what could have been useable space above the cabinets, or better yet, space for taller cabinets. Taller cabinets would have greatly helped in the small area that IS available for wall cabinets, that very small area that is not filled with doorways, windows, the fridge or the oven. There are two small cabinets above the fridge and oven, but they installed cabinets there that are so shallow front to back, that they can't hold pots or pans or dishes, and putting food storage above an oven is stupid and dangerous. The only below the counter cabinet goes back deep and wide under an L-shape counter next to the sink, but it has a door that is only about 10 inches wide, making it difficult to put large pots and pans with side handles in it...but it is the only space do do that... and retrieving items often requires lying or kneeling on the floor, wrenching my shoulders as I fumble blindly in the way back of the pitch-dark area, with the farthest corners nearly unreachable even with my long arms. Clearly not a place to store either food items, or dinnerware. Using a good portion of the wall cabinets above the L-shaped counter area requires a step-ladder, even though I am 5'10" tall and as I said, the false fronts mean the cabinets aren't that high....but you can't reach both way up AND across a wide counter area.. and that counter area is also not much good, since so much of it is stuffed deep into the corner formation. Boy, I could write a lovely catalog description to sell this floor plan, LOL.


It's not just the size and shape of the kitchen, it's all the doors and windows in such a small area. I'd refer to the 'floor plan', but seriously, no one could have intentionally PLANNED this mess. This small, somewhat irregular space has a total of five doors (3 to other rooms, one to the basement, one to the outside) and two large windows, plus the mini-pantry and broom closet doors. You can't open one door without blocking another one. Countless, countless times every week, I'm digging stuff out of the freezer chest, and have to stop so my husband can get out of the adjoining bathroom (which is also a thru way to the bedroom) and into the kitchen and living room areas, or else he knocks me in the back with the basement door as he comes up the stairs and I'm in the freezer chest. Or I open the fridge door and block the dining room entrance just as he comes through the dining room to come to the kitchen or basement, and so I have to close it again, let him pass, and open it again. Or I shut the door between living room and kitchen to get to the broom closet door open, and he comes up on the other side and smacks me in the back with that door.


THIS is a 'Kitchen Impossible'. Too bad all those shows seem to be based on the West Coast. I'd like to give them a real challenge!

The only advantage is that with one step and a minor rotation, I can reach the sink, the fridge, the oven, the dishwasher, and what has to be considered 'counter space'. As I advance in age, that is less area to clean and less walking on fading joints. And, it is good for a laugh!

On edit: I forgot to mention that the electric oven, the refrigerator, and all of the outlets in the kitchen, as well as living room outlets in the only space really available for a tv, were all on the same circuit with the washer and dryer in the basement.