We are so in love with you.  We feel like you are our little baby, and in many ways you are.  Never you mind that Martha Stewart’s kitchen is twice as big as our entire house.  We like you just how you are – all 36 square feet of bubbly, delicious bliss bundled all together in the tiny corner of our living room.

Remember what you looked like when we first met?  I was already trying to give you a sunny disposition with my yellow paint the moment I got the okay… and I figured out where to buy paint in Germany.

You just needed a little more American in you and a little less German – merely meaning Germans like closed kitchens and call open kitchens “American”.  Well that and I don’t know how to cook like a German.  But you seemed to hit it off with my American measuring cups just fine.  And the cosmetic surgery!

In fact, if I do say so myself, you quite prefer English these days.  Or at least I hope so.  Last time I checked, Veganomicon was not being published in German.

But enough of this lovey dovey stuff.  You know what you’ve taught us?

Bigger does not have to mean better.

A life of minimalism can be a really good life.  We don’t need a lot of kitchen stuff to make good food.  We’re not tempted to spend money on one-use gadgets.  In fact, we’re getting used to having less.  And we’re loving it!  (Here’s where you start beaming.)

Do you know how many people have questioned the necessity of more than two burners on their stovetops since visiting Making This Home or meeting you in person?

Did you know that you taught me to stop turning to the microwave for quick fixes?  I really like your little oven/microwave combo unit.  Now I can cook butter on the stove or warm up soup.  Actually, I have to when the oven is on.  I was seriously a microwave girl before.

Don’t tell me you aren’t loving your very own half-size dishwasher.  You went all these years without one.  Now you have your own tiny Katie-spoiler to go with all the other little appliances.

And you know what the coolest thing you’ve taught Martin and me is?  How to have fun.  In the kitchen. Together. Here’s the three of us making caramel.  Aren’t we cute?  I mix.  You cook.  Martin and his lab gear measure.

I’ll bet Martha doesn’t get a graph reading of the temperature of her caramels like you do.

So thanks little kitchen.  Thanks for teaching us to live more simply and do more by hand.  And – most importantly – thanks for keeping our tummies fed.  We couldn’t have done it without you.

Hugs and kisses.

Katie

P.S.  Mind if I mention the little list of treasures we love with our readers?  They might like to see what’s in our Amazon Shop – you know, some of those good things like our favorite eco-products and organizing tools that bring us peace and happiness.

Any other kitchen love out there?  Please share… promise ours won’t get jealous!

By now, you’re probably pretty familiar with our 36 square foot kitchen remodel that we were busy doing last year at this time.  (If you aren’t, we’ve got a slew of before and after shots on Our Kitchen Remodel Page.)  The kitchen is our pride and joy.  But there was a time when the whole project almost went up in smoke.

We were almost finished when our countertops didn’t fit!

By taking such a serious DIY approach to our remodel by making our own cabinets and installing everything ourselves, we were able to save a chunk of change.  We were also able to budget a granite countertop.  (Thank goodness our space was small!)

We made a critical mistake and didn’t check to see if our wall that we tore down half way was perfectly perpendicular to our exterior walls.  It was off by about one degree.  The other problem was our counters weren’t cut perfectly square either.  They were off by one degree, too.  All of that’s not a problem in the beginning.  But by the time you get to the end of the counter, one degree of difference means our countertops hung over one side by an extra 3/4 of an inch and didn’t cover all our cabinets on the other side.

These little mistakes are so easy to do.  It’s even easier to beat ourselves up over them and feel discouraged or angry.  But we need to try not to do that.  I think Martin and I probably spent about eight hours trying to tweak the countertop and make it fit.  (The worst is when the flaws are partly your own fault.)

We had to do everything from cutting off pieces with the table saw to sanding to filling gaps with a little extra caulking.

When you look at your home, try not to look at the faults or the bits you changed to best correct those faults.  Try to see the beauty.  Try to find inspiration and joy from your home because ultimately, if you are always thinking about the flaws in your space or pointing them out to other people, those flaws will always be there. When you stop fretting about them, faults have this way of just disappearing.

Today our countertop is much better.  It’s still not completely perfect, but I don’t say anything – not to my husband, to our guests, or to myself.  And if it weren’t for Houseblogs’s little contest all about DIY drama, I’m not sure I would have remembered it at all.  Isn’t that how home should be?

How many of you have found yourselves completely hooked to those home remodeling shows on HGTV?  And how many of you cringe when the cast slips on the most basic construction vocabulary?  (Maybe that second one is just Martin and me, so maybe it really is a good thing we don’t have TV out here in the tire house).  

In any case – cringe or no cringe – here are two basic slip ups you’re guaranteed to hear.  Feel free to label yourself as an official know-it-all after this post.  Just don’t expect HGTV to come knocking, okay?

Slip up #1.  ”We’re installing hardwood floors in the kitchen.”  All wood floors are not hardwood floors.  We have different types of wood, just like we have different types of apples.  Just because I think gala apples are the best, it doesn’t mean all apples are gala.  It’s the same with wood floors.  

Yes, hard woods (like cherry, maple, and beech) are usually better for flooring materials than the competition, soft woods (like pine, cedar, and fir) because hardwoods tend to be denser and harder.  We need every ounce of strength we can get underfoot, but don’t be fooled by thinking all floors are hardwood.  Some softwoods are actually harder than some hardwoods.  So you just never know.  Well except you do know one thing:  all wood floors are not hardwood.

Slip up #2.  ”We’ve been using a table saw for that there job.”  I guess because we set this saw on a table, people on TV frequently call it a table saw:

Sorry folks.  No matter how much I correct the people on TV from my chair, they just don’t listen.  That quick guy is a chop saw.  It’s really good for cutting trim, crown molding, and 2×4s.  The blade gets great angles, but it can’t cover a lot of area like a table saw can.

Here’s a table saw.  Notice how it is the table:

A table saw has a blade coming out of the table itself, which is incredibly dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.  (The blade is covered by a clear plastic shield guard here.)  More people lose their fingers to table saws every year.  Martin and I cut all of our cabinet walls, doors, and shelves in our kitchen with a table saw because it’s really good for cutting large, long things like sheets of wood.  I often hung out the window to balance pieces of wood as Martin cut them on the table saw.

Know any other frequent slip-ups when it comes to tools and terms?  Or do we have any smarty pants in the house who already knew this stuff?  I don’t mind co-correcting people on TV if you want to get together.

Update:  It seems I just discovered how to get my husband talking on this site.  Martin brings up some fabulous points in the comments that you might want to check out.

(Images from Amazon.com)

It’s true what people say:  Everything is bigger in the United States.

We sadly kissed our little kitchen in Berlin goodbye:

and replaced it with this big guy in the US:

We’re calling the burbs of Denver home for a couple of weeks until we head into the mountains and get all rustic.  We’re so thankful to the couple letting us be here again while they’re gone.  I’m just having a really tough time adapting to the much, much larger space.  (For reference:  the island in this kitchen has the same square footage as our entire kitchen in Berlin.)  I have no idea when I would need two ovens, especially now that I’m used to my microwave and oven being the same appliance.  And I cannot tell you how much food we keep forgetting about in the fridge already because we’re used to our standard German fridge that’s the same size as a dorm fridge in the US.

The good news is that I probably walk a good 1/3 mile putting away dishes.  Making dinner is even more.  All this walking might balance out the fact that the grocery store is a good fifteen minutes’ drive in these suburbs, so I can’t walk.  I know that we are beyond blessed (spoiled?) to call this home for a few weeks no matter how different it is from what we prefer.

We’re still a bit overwhelmed with our adjustment, so how ’bout you tell us what you like?  Are you into a big kitchen, a little one, or something in the middle?  Maybe you can’t live without two ovens.  Then again, you might not be able to stand having more than two mixing bowls.  Whatever it is, we want to know:  What’s your dream kitchen like?

 Every house has those little trouble spots that make people shake their heads and ask, “What were those architects thinking?”  Our house is no different.  The crew that designed our house did an awesome job with the 480 square feet they had to work with in our long, skinny house.  Sure there were still a few problems that we worked hard to eliminate:

First there was the narrow alcove off the hallway.  We turned that into our bike rack (or “our double garage” as we call it) and put a huge drawer under it to store extra blankets and pillows for when guests come.

Then there was the obvious nightmare that was the 36 square foot kitchen.  It cut into the living room and offered no counters or storage.  So we attacked that wall with a saws-all.  Then we slowly built up our dream kitchen… or “American kitchen” as Germans are quick to note.

It seemed we were finding a solution to every problem that came our way.  We were feeling really proud of ourselves until one night.  We’d just finished building the basic framework of the floor-to-ceiling cabinets and slid the appliances in to make sure they fit.  We were also tired of tripping over them.  Between all of the tools and lumber in our house, we were eager to get the extra space.  Then instead of eliminating another problem in the architecture of our home, we discovered that we had created a problem ourselves.

This is our convection oven/microwave combination unit.  With a switch of a dial, it can microwave our tea or bake some German cookies.  We love it to death.  

Well that is to say we love it to death as long as we’re not using the sink when it’s on.  The vent on the oven/microwave is at about nose level.  You can’t actually see the vent, so we had no idea it was there above the handle.  When the microwave or oven is on, the fan kicks in.  The fan blows air right up.  Into our eyes.

I guess it goes to show that even the most detailed planning such as our measure-five-times, cut-once strategy can’t always guarantee success for everything.  Like I said, every house has those little trouble spots that make people shake their heads and ask…  Oh well.

Now that we’ve confessed our house’s weakness, how about you tell us about yours.  What’s the flaw that really drives you batty?  Obviously, if you created the problem yourself, we’re not going to judge.

By now, you all know how much Martin and I think about the environment in our day-to-day.  It’s part of the reason we like to bike everywhere.  So when we ran across this little Berlin shop, we knew we were in heaven.

This shop is a Natur am Bau or natural building supplies store where we buy all of our varnish.  

Natural varnish isn’t filled with all the nasty products that release off gases that are toxic to our health like standard varnish.  All those fumes that come with varnish and give you pounding headaches?  Yep.  That’s the pretty nasty stuff hurting your short term and long term health.  So we didn’t even have to do the math on this one.  Spending a little extra money on natural varnish meant we could keep living in our house during our kitchen remodel.   We didn’t have to stay in a hotel, and we didn’t have to worry about future off gassing.

Of course, I’m all about saving time, too.  There’s nothing worse than spending five minutes cleaning your brush in a bucket of toxic solvent after you’ve varnished.  As luck would have it, natural varnish is water based.  

All I had to do was stick my brush under the sink with a little soap, and it was as good as new; the stuff going down the sink was in the clear.  With as many times as I had to sand/varnish/sand/varnish (whew!) and then flip the doors and shelves over to sand/varnish… you get the idea… let’s just say I was beyond ecstatic about my easy-wash brushes.  The stuff dried in 15 minutes.  

I want to call it my liquid miracle, but that’s a little salesman-like, no?  All we know is this:  regular old varnish no more.

We’ve got one more kitchen varnish project in the works for you.  I just had to get more varnish!

So what about you?  Anyone else have experience with natural varnishes and paint?  Then again, can you even find natural products in your community?