Small homes are cozy and charming and all those other descriptive words that real estate agents have been marketing, don’t you think?  And I’ll admit, so many things about small homes really are cute and charming.

Except for this:

Can you see the kitchen in there?

Because we can’t.

That’s our Berlin, Germany kitchen pre-move-in date, sprinkled with the belongings of previous tenants.

So why the closed in space?

Germans like to have separate spaces for all the different functions in their lives.  When you walk into a German home, you are often greeted by a hallway of closed doors.  It makes sense in the winter–you only heat the parts of the house that you need, and I don’t know about your house, but no one hangs out in our entryway but the shoes.  In our home, this General Theory of Seperate Spaces has totally dissected a piece of the living room.  It looks pretty bad, and I really can’t see anyone jumping to cook in there.

What’s a kid to do?

The previous tenants were a little apprehensive about letting us take pictures of their home.  I felt kind of bad, too–not just because we were taking pictures of their things, but because they had to manage in such a tiny kitchen space with no storage, no counter, and no dishwasher.  I’ve seen bar sinks that were bigger, and I couldn’t even open the oven without standing halfway in the living room.

Their only short-term solution was a second fridge so they could also have a freezer.  (The built-in fridge is the white cabinet to the right of those hot pads above the burners.)  The only kitchen storage is the cupboards above and below the fridge:

Early morning question: which fridge has the milk?

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?  Those walls HAVE to come down…

(Images by Katie for Making This Home)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Our Kitchen: Remodel, Our World: Berlin Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.