Cooking Up A New Kitchen

The kitchen has been the most stressful and challenging part of making our new co-op apartment a home. When we purchased the apartment, the kitchen looked like this:

Not the worse looking kitchen on the block, but the stove didn't work, there weren't enough cabinets (those that were there had a grimy film on them) and the refrigerator smelled like something three-times worse than spoiled milk. So we decided the refrigerator, stove and cabinets had to go, all to be replaced with items of our choosing.

While we were at it, we pulled up the linoleum tile floor and found an unsettling surprise in one corner--a huge, perfectly rectangular hole about two feet by two-and-a-half feet that when you looked down it seemed to have no bottom. Mind you this was where the heavy refrigerator had been located. We later learned that this hole was part of a dumb waiter system that had been removed years ago.

Once we cleared everything out of the kitchen, we proceeded to paint the room a cheery golden yellow (Benjamin Moore Dorset Gold to be exact). In the photo below you can see the beginning of the painting process and the place where the dumb waiter used to be, now covered by a sturdy wood board. Thankfully, our new kitchen design doesn't require us to put anything extremely heavy in the spot where the dumb waiter used to be.

We turned to Park Slope Kitchen Gallery for assistance in designing our new kitchen. We were moving from an apartment with a larger galley kitchen with lots of cabinets so we needed to create as much storage space as possible, especially since we had sacrificed the kitchen pantry to house the refrigerator so that we would be able to have more counter space.

The salesperson helped us come up with the following design:

After placing the cabinet order in mid-August, all we had to do was wait the five weeks for delivery before we could have kitchen of our dreams. (Actually, the kitchen of our dreams is larger than 80 square feet, and has shiny stainless steel Viking appliances and a generous, multifunctional island. This apartment kitchen design was about as dreamy as we could get in the limited space we had to work with.)