I’m siting here tonight, my home filled with the smell of bread, my husband happily wood carving in the chair next to me, my babies deep in sleep in their room and I know that life is good. Although a bit of the holiday stress and drama did finally reach us in the last few days, it took only a quiet family day to shake it off and move on again. Life has resumed. On Monday, work and preschool will be back in full force. Little Man and I will start-up our normal daily routine and time will trot along again. But there is an air of change, something is different here and I like it. I’ve mentioned in my last post that this year was our first year with a clear intention of moving projects along, creating our homestead and pushing past complacency and grabbing all our challenges and running with them. So we started down the list on January 1st while the kiddos were napping!
This is our tiny TINY kitchen :
I mentioned a few months back how we were in the process of getting rid of quite a bit of possessions. A big part of this was to free our home of clutter and getting rid of things we just didn’t use or need. But another reason was the simple need for space. The kitchen was our first battlefield. Like most, we were big into small kitchen appliances, kitchen gadgets and the like. We love to cook so any fancy kitchen tool designed to make our cooking experience “easier” would always grab our eye. But we found out quickly that all they would do is crowd our counters and cabinets. So we started getting rid of things… and more things… and finally, we got to the point we were dreaming of : Letting go of enough stuff to take down the upper cabinets.
And what a difference it makes! Just imagine freshly painted walls, new oven fan and 150 year old reclaimed barn wood open shelves filled with my grandmother’s antique dishes! And that light… So much light!
Today, my husband continued with our kitchen project and I finally got my window shelves to start my indoor herb garden :
The shelves are removable so that in spring, I can move my herbs and plants outside and get access to the window. Those gorgeous pieces of wood are some of the pieces of reclaimed barn wood we got a few months back. I can’t wait for tomorrow : Planting seeds with my baby girl. Dreaming of plants, fresh herbs and microgreens makes the dead of winter seem less austere.
Slowly this house is becoming the home of our dreams. To many, our cramped little corner of the world may seem unseemly, but for us, it is filled with all we hold dear : Our love for each other and the world we’ve created around ourselves. It may be small, but everyone is welcome!
Have a wonderful night every one. And Happy New Year again. xo
Family, Faith, Food and Fabric 
Wonderful! I can’t wait to see those shelves. I thought about that kind of thing too. Or maybe taking the doors off and such… We got snow here in Tucson btw! It was only a dusting but it was enough to make us all excited. 🙂
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I saw! So much joy everywhere… our family in California had mixed feelings, but the kiddos were excited. I would have felt like a little kid too. 🙂
If you do fix up your kitchen, I hope you’ll share… We would love to see it. 🙂
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I love lower cabinets and would get of the uppers in a minute. We have a lot of unused space above, and a lot of what IS there could go away. I think you will love your new kitchen!
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I think so too. My husband is in the lower cabinets tearing down the lazy-Susans in the corners. Lazy-Susans and I don’t get along at all… *shivers*. he will be building shelves down there and doubling our space which means more cabinets are coming down… this is all so VERY exciting!
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I think your kitchen will be fantastic when you’re finished. And how awesome to have a handy kinda guy under your own roof. I’ve got one too 😊
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Oh yes… I thank the Universe everyday for my “I can whip that up for you” hubby! 🙂 It will definitely be a work in progress. (I don’t see us painting until the spring when we can open up the windows), but we will at least slap a bit of primer on top to even out the patches I think. So much potential… It will be lovely! Thank you for stopping by!
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Brilliant….for now I just ‘think’ about what lurks in the depth of some of the kitchen cupboards………..just how many bread tins does one person need. Thinking plant – herb planters maybe!
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LOL! Funny enough, bread tins are about the only thing I kept doubles of. When we make bread, I can fit 4 bread tins at once in my oven, so we make double and triple recipes and have bread for 2 weeks. 🙂 But yes… The stuff I found emptying the edges an backs of my cupboards, I couldn’t believe it!
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there are so so many people that need big and bigger. i do like space, i admit, but that’s a psychological need rather than a material need. i couldn’t quite live in a Tiny House, but would be very happy in a little cottage.
i remember when we built our large farmhouse, we had one friend say about our living room ‘well it’s big enough I suppose’. he was planning on an enormous house. like i always say, bigger house = more housework. i’d much rather be doing other wonderful things!
loving the window shelves.
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Thank you for sharing… Our house isn’t small enough to be considered “tiny”, but it is small. We have 926 sq.ft. We have half a basement and a crawl space under part of the house so lots of possibilities of storage, but that also comes with lots of possibilities of clutter : Out of sight, out of mind, right?
For us, the one thing people have a hard time with is the fact our kids share a room. That just seems unnatural to many somehow… don’t know way! I shared a room with my sister until I was 11, my husband shared a room with his 2 brothers until they left for college. We all turned out okay. When my daughter reaches that age when dressing in front of her brother is an issue, we will cross that bridge, but for now, she loves having her baby brother in there. So if it doesn’t bother her, why oh why should it bother anyone else? LOL!
Funny you should say cottage, it,s why we bought our house… feels like a cottage. We have knotted pine ceilings and walls, big panoramic windows… very cozy and sweet. 🙂
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My girls have done the best job of paring down what they have. I told them if we sell what they don’t need in a yard sale, we can buy new paint and a cool rug, whatever they want. The first three days of the new year are crucial for momentum, and it looks your family is off to a great start!
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Anything to get them motivated, I agree! My daughter gave away so much this year with the promise of better more age appropriate toys for her birthday and Christmas… she didn’t even hesitate.
The rest of the cabinets came down today… it’s simply wonderful! Very exciting… 🙂
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You’ll share pictures, right?
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I will for sure… I just want to rearrange the kitchen a bit. It’s a bit chaotic right now. Next step : sanding, priming, painting an a new oven hood… Then later on, shelves and finishing touches. So very exciting, I’ll tell you!
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Happy New Year! Your kitchen will be so lovely–can’t wait to see it!
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Thank you, happy new year to you as well! It,s moving along quite nicely, all this is very exciting for sure… Like I mentioned before, the actual painting and all will happen in the warmer months. But the sheer joy of having the cabinets down is enough to make me giddy!
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Happy New Year and may you successfully tread your path of peace and love! Your family is such an inspiration: living small, but really living. I believe that people once lived like that, before all the new technology and capitalism took control. Cheers for keeping in real and simple! 🙂
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Thank you for the kind words… I think people were honestly happier when living the more simple life. I wouldn’t go back 100 years… today,s advances in sciences and technologies have made many things better (health, education, etc.)… but the family values were so much more real back then. It is what we are trying to grasp a bit of today. 🙂
Happy New Year to you… all you desire and more! xo
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How wonderful that you and your husband can take this on together. Our kitchen is the same size ~ and we’ve gone in and made many changes. With each change, it gets better and better (and we wonder why we didn’t do it before! 🙂 These are our favorite things to do ~ it does look so much more open without the cabinets ~ can’t wait to see it once it’s more done.
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I often have that feeling as well “why oh why did we ever wait???”… Better late than never right? It,s moving along nicely. I can’t wait to share more… 🙂
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My kitchen is a little bigger than yours by the looks of things. It is the food I find it difficult to store as I buy some things in bulk as it reduces cost and packaging but it is finding the space to store it all. I had a kitchen tidy up clear out in the summer but I think I am due another one! I love it when I space in the house comes together to be more useable your kitchen is looking great. I shared a room with both my younger brothers until I was ten, there was a room for me to move into before that but I wanted the company!
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So funny you should say that. it took me months to get used to having a room all to myself when we my parents bought a bigger house.
We also buy a lot in bulk (especially raw ingredients like flours, nuts, dried fruits, grains, seeds, legumes and all our plant based milks.) but we have a small half basement so we can keep them downstairs. The laundry room is more an EVERYTHING room… We will be slowly attacking renos in that room in a few years. For now, it works…
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I love the window herb shelves! We are in the process of sketching up our future home and putting in LOTS of windows…don’t know when the construction will start, but putting down a solid design and beginning to see all our ideas come into one form is so exciting.
Have so much fun planting those seeds 🙂
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The dreaming part is so amazing! Just the whirlwind of ideas. We are just doing the kitchen and the bathroom this year and it was still enough to keep me up one night. I can’t even imagine a whole house! 🙂 Hope you’ll share your plans. 🙂
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Your kitchen looks wonderful already! I love light penetrating my spaces too. And those shelves are just perfect. 🙂 So nice to have a handy man around! Wishing you a happy 2015!
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Yes, would not trade my hubby for anyone! 🙂
You should see it now (we took out the last cabinets)… so big! next step, prime, paint and new oven hood… Very exciting indeed! Happy New Year to you dear Alexa. xo
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Wow! Took the cabinets out that is a big step. Our kitchens seem to be about the same (house too @ 960sqft)
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YAY for little homes… It was quite a process. We’ve been getting rid of stuff for a year now (and we still are)… Next step, dishwasher! We are trying a month of not using it to see how we like it. So far, so good. 🙂
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We have no dishwasher too (or maybe I should say I AM the dishwasher :P) I rather like it, not that I could fit a dishwasher in the kitchen if I wanted to… No repairs to ever worry about and considering you have to wash the pots and pans by hand anyways and rinse the dishes first it doesn’t seem to save me much work. I use to hate having to wash dishes (they never end!) but I decided since I had to do it anyways to try to find something I enjoyed about it. I LOVE hot water and soap is kinda fun too. Plus the kids like to help sometimes.
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You know what has motivated us? The quiet… dishwashers are SO NOISY! Now, we can have the kiddos in the dinning room, us in the kitchen and we can talk gently without shouting over the grind… It’s heavenly! The place where the dishwasher is will become the space for our floor to ceiling open pantry! *giggles with excitement* So many projects!
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oops…also was trying to say I love your ceiling and your new window shelves! I thought of doing a similar thing but I never thought of removeable ones- brillant!
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We love them… it’s too cold to germinate anything by them right now so they are still kind of bare (we have an insane cold front right now) but as the plants are growing stronger, we’ll be able to move them up. We are pretty excited about having a nice lush green window in the dead of winter. It will feel like spring!
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looks beautiful, keep us posted! A happy and peaceful New Year to you all, xoxo
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I will, so much happening. We should be priming in the next few weeks. We’ve been shopping for forged iron hardware, it is just a dream coming true… Wanted a small farmhouse style kitchen for so long. 🙂
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Lots of admiration for how you’re making your home work as you want too. I bet it will look gorgeous when it’s finished, that wood is just beautiful.
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That wood was a gift from Heaven… it was gifted to us and is 150 years old. Just amazing… so many possibilities. My husband wants to build us a new dining table with benches. We will be heading to a salvage place downtown that has antique hardware to find braces and iron hammered nails for finishing the shelves. All very exciting!
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I also pared down a bit when we did our kitchen remodel, so I admire what you’re doing! Open shelving is a wonderful things… Can’t wait to see more pictures!
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Thank you… I just love the open-ness of it. We should be sanding and priming soon. I’ll be sure to post pics of the work. 🙂 It will be a slow project, but we are doing everything ourselves. Very exciting!
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