A Kitchen for Christmas

Wouldn't we all like that, huh? I know I would.

My kitchen is already too crowded as it is, since I don't have a dish washer (and never have had one, but I imagine it's incredible) and my husband does not like to do dishes in a timely fashion. I've also got a toddler who likes to spend a lot of time rifling through my lower cupboards and opening and closing the fridge. Not that he actually wants anything. Just wants to look.

Which I totally get.

But sadly, I am not the one getting a kitchen for Christmas. No, we decided to kill two birds with one stone and build Oliver his own play kitchen. Christmas gift - check. Get him out of my kitchen - check.

And I fell completely head over heels in love with this one, from Young House Love. So much so, in fact, that I wanted to recreate it as closely as possible. I've seen a LOT of play kitchens, especially in the Pinterest community. It seems like quite a trend right now, actually, and I've seen many that I liked, too. But when I spotted this one, I knew I had to have it. And since they didn't actually sell the play kitchen they built, but instead gifted it to a toddler of their own, I decided to tackle it DIY style.

First things first, we popped over to a thrift store in Altona (MCC pride, yo) to see if we could find an existing piece of furniture on the cheap that we could transform into the kitchen of our Oliver's dreams.

We stumbled across this fine little shelf and decided it was definitely the one for us. It was a little bit too high, it had a weird piece of wood nailed stapled to the back of it, and definitely needed some work, but we had the vision and we were going to run with it.

We actually contemplated keeping the weird piece of wood on the back, and tossed around the idea of creating some kind of faux kitchen backsplash, but decided that it was just too tall, and took up too much space. We wanted simple, small, and relatively easy. So off it came.

We cut off the entire base (see that weird bit with the black plastic stuck onto it in some kind of retro ugly pattern?) And built doors to act as the fridge and oven. We painted the whole thing, cut a hole for the sink, cut a hole for a window into the oven, added accessories, and voila! Finito!

I love love love how it turned out. And it's so interesting how it all came together, too. We definitely had some struggles and fails along the way, but that can be expected when you're trying to tackle a project like this one, with a little guy running around, and a bulbous belly to overcome.

We used a wire rack we found at Dollarama for the oven rack. I don't even know what it's original intended purpose is, since it seems like it's exactly what we needed for this. We also added a little touch light to the top of the inside of the oven, so if Oliver reaches in he can "turn the oven on." We used some clear plastic from an old poster frame we had lying around and weren't using to make the oven window, and a painted white picture frame on the front of the oven door to finish it off. The little black knobs we snagged off of a different play kitchen piece we found at a thrift store that didn't quite work with this set up - but the knobs were perfect!

The sink is a stainless steel mixing bowl from Dollarama as well, the hot/cold knobs are actually just cupboard knobs, and the faucet is a curtain hanging hook!

We wanted him to still be able to use the counter top portion of the kitchen, so we opted not to make a full range, and instead we put together a little "hot plate" if you will, so he can move it around as he wishes. That way there's still room to "prepare" food on the counter, or basically do whatever else he wants up there. We made the hot plate out of two cork pot holders, one painted blue and the other left plain, and a metal pot holder. All from Dollarama as well.

I think that my absolute favourite part, though, is that since we opted to only have two knobs (and we quite literally only HAD two knobs) the oven looks like it has a happy little face. Every time I look at it, it's smiling at me. Which I absolutely love.

So there it is! The final product! And I give full inspirational credit to John and Sherry Petersik from over at Young House Love. Those guys really know how it's done. It looks effortless, but trust me, it soooo wasn't. We had a tremendous amount of struggles, and learned a lot of lessons about any future DIY projects we decide to tackle. Those lessons include:

1. Magnetic paint does not work.
We coated the fridge door with it in the hopes that Oliver could stick his magnets to it like a real fridge, but sadly after almost ten coats (yup, ten!) we could not get any magnets to stick to it. Any. And we used the expensive Rustoleum stuff! Tragic. So we just painted over it, and moved on.

2. Spend the extra couple of bucks, and get a quality spray paint.
We spent so many hours fighting with our cheap can of white spray paint we got from Wal Mart, the drips and mess, and overall failure of the whole experience really killed our spirits. We actually ended up just using a roller and some wall paint to finish it off. And it's so far from perfect, because of our 15 failed coat attempts. It's bumpy and lumpy and not quite how we imagined, so in the future I think we'll spring for something a little higher quality and avoid the stress.

3. If you're waiting for something to be perfect, it will never get done.
The perfectionist in both Matt and me wanted to keep tweaking and adding and removing paint and repainting and changing this little baby, but at one point Matt just sat me down and told me that if I wanted it to be perfect, we'd never finish it. Which is true. We bought the furniture and pieces for this project in May of this year. And only finished it in October. True story. So we learned to love the bumps and lumps and uneven cuts, because they would forever remind us of the love we put into this project.

Now all that's left to do is resist the temptation to give it to Oliver early! His Grandma has already purchased him little stainless steel pots and pans, as well as more play food than I think he could ever know what to do with, so this baby is good to go for Christmas morning! I can't wait to see his reaction to it. It was definitely a labor of love, that's for sure.

Anyone else discover the magnetic paint conspiracy? Did I just get a faulty can? Were my test-magnets staging some kind of coup? It just wasn't meant to be, I guess. But we're happy with the result in the end.

So, how many days left until Christmas? :)