The Betsy Kitchen

The process of arranging my belongings into Daniel’s house (which I have affectionately named Betsy) has been a long one.

Betsy is small and both Daniel and I have a lot of stuff.

It took me four weeks to declare the first room of the house (the kitchen) done (and even now, there’s plenty I’d like to do with Betsy’s kitchen at some point.)

Future plans notwithstanding, I feel a little surge of joy every time I walk into Betsy’s kitchen-the joy of knowing that things are in order.

While Betsy’s kitchen is Tiny (note the capital “T”), it does have the advantage of having cupboards all the way to the ceiling. I can’t say how much I appreciate this. The little corner shelves are an additional plus–in this case, they’re holding my super-abundant drink stuff (coffee/tea/hot chocolate).

The kitchen has an angled sink–which means there’s a triangle of only partly usable space behind it. Initially, this was a repository for recyclables, paint brushes in jars, and pretty much anything else that didn’t have a home. I cleaned it up, found a home for everything (or moved it to another room until a home can be found for it), and placed a cheery red fruit dish in the empty space.

The ladies in Columbus showered me with money with which to purchase a pantry–and boy, is it wonderful to have one. We bought a standard-issue fiberboard cupboard and Daniel cut me some additional shelves for it. It’s nice to have all my dry goods (flour and sugar and beans and rice and…) all together in one place. Thanks ladies!

I didn’t intend for the kitchen’s color scheme to end up turquoise and red–but when I got to the top of the fridge, I knew I wanted something to corral the miscellaneous items that make their way up there. Rooting through my belongings, I found two turquoise tubs (one from my Missionette’s days, one from a shower I gave for my sister-in-law) and a red bowl. If Pinterest is any indication, the scheme is something of a retro-mod fad these days–so I might just be unintentionally fashionable.

You can see one of those “projects to get done at some point” on the left side of the fridge. We want to build a very narrow shelf for canned goods in that space–but, until it’s done, I have boxes and boxes of home canned food stacked in that space.

There’s another of those little shelf units on the stove side of the room–and I’ve filled it with my cookbooks. For the most part, this works well, but I occasionally find myself losing a cookbook off the end. I really ought to put some of those cheapo bookends on my gift registry–but I’m incredibly lazy about updating said registry. Maybe…actually, how about I go do that now…

This last picture of the kitchen shows both the progress that we’ve made and the progress yet to be made. Before I came, there was a door attached to that doorway. The door opened toward the sink. The sink had absolutely no counter space beside it for dirty dishes. As a result, all dirty dishes were piled in the sink.

Now, I know a lot of women (and men) pile their dirty dishes in the sink as a matter of course–but I’m not too into that. In MY kitchen, I like to have my sink free to be used. I want to be able to fill a pan, soak a dish, peel potatoes, or fill up my sink with soapy water to do dishes WITHOUT having to empty the sink of dishes first. Which meant that getting something that could hold dirty dishes was a priority for me.

We ended up buying a little rolling cart that fits in the space between the sink and the doorway (we removed the door to make it fit). I can move the cart around the kitchen if I want to use it as an extra prep surface–and it gives me extra drawer/cabinet space underneath. The rolling aspect is pretty important, since the doorway gets a bit tight with it in place.

Of course, you can also see through the doorway down the steps–and see that I still have plenty of work to do getting the rooms apart from the kitchen in order.

But it’s nice to have a start.

I’m quite pleased with my Betsy kitchen.