Witness the kitchen of our apartment. Most of the time, on blogs, people show pics of really cool looking kitchens which, if not bodaciously spacious, are aesthetically pleasing. They show pics of their new tiled floors or new ceramic tiled backsplashes. Not many people put up pics of ugly kitchens which don’t have a title of “We are remodeling!” We aren’t remodeling. We live in an apartment. Yes, I know some people remodel their apartment. Not us. Our cash must go elsewhere and besides we never know when the building might be sold out from under us, though no one wanted it the last time the landlord’s brothers attempted to sell it. His brothers do the real estate buy and sell end. He acts as handyman and manager, keeping things rented and looked after and fixing what needs to be fixed imperatively.
Our kitchen, as you can see, is decidedly Ungreen, except for the fact most of it is second hand and has been in use a very long time. To make myself feel better, I count that.
Well, our glassware and dishes aren’t secondhand. We got them at Ikea this year when most of our old second-hand stuff had broken and we decided to go ahead and get stuff that matched. But all our oven crockery is secondhand and our storage containers and you can’t see it but my traveling coffee mug may not be secondhand but I’ve managed to keep ahold of it for eleven years, even once dashing back to the middle of a 6 point intersection, in which 6 lanes of traffic had started moving again, to retrieve the cup I’d accidentally dropped when running across said intersection. At night. Not too bright, I know, but I’m sentimental about that mug.
Anyway, recently our last microwave bit the dust at about eight years of age and the replacement we purchased turned out to be slightly larger than our last microwave and ate up a couple of inches more of food prep counter space, the only food prep counter space we have.
Exhibit A
Ignore the colonial chair, which I hate. I deplore that chair, which my MIL didn’t want and my husband tends to accept second hand goods indiscriminately. Such as that chair. Which she didn’t want because the finish didn’t quite match her other chairs so she was needing some new chairs with a matching finish. We don’t worry about things like matching finish because I paint all our second-hand furniture. I planned to paint that chair bright red and yellow and green but it turned out to have a weird poly finish on it and wouldn’t be easily painted so I didn’t even try. That chair will soon be out on the sidewalk waiting to be picked up by someone else in the apartment building, trust me. Because I hate hate hate colonial and am now committed to getting rid of that chair.
We always land in places where people snatch up anything that can be possibly recycled. That’s one reason we landed at This Old Apartment Building. Because the landlord used to work hard (volunteer) for water conservation and because he recycles everything. I liked this, that he had worked for water conservation and that so much around here had been preserved or recycled, yes, in the interest of saving money, but whatever. He’s always saving furniture and crap and finding other uses or people who would like to have it. There are times when this can be annoying because the kitchen door opens onto an urban junkman’s holler and so we only open it to take out the trash and to ventilate the kitchen when cooking. I imagine this is very annoying to the people living in the pricey higher-rise behind us, but then I imagine there isn’t anything about this old building that isn’t annoying to them. I too would prefer we had a New Orleans style courtyard alley out back of that door and that the junkman’s thing was confined to the areas around the storage portions of the building. Ain’t gonna happen though.
I’m not very bright in some ways. When we moved in here we had narrowed the choices down to here and an apartment in a house that had been completely refurbished. Beautifully refurbished. The floors were gorgeous. The kitchen was gorgeous. It had a fireplace. It was small but gorgeous and had a back yard. I mean it was awesome and barely within our price range. But it wasn’t near public transportation and wasn’t within walking distance of a grocery store. We would also have been second floor tenants and I worried about this with a child, that H.o.p. would drive the downstairs neighbors crazy, especially in a house which hadn’t been originally designed for dual family occupancy and to absorb sound. So I opted for here. Plus as I said I figured a landlord who’d worked for water conservation and spent hundreds of hours raising money for the public library was our kind of landlord.
Our refrigerator is not remotely green. The refrigerator and the oven were supplied and the landlord isn’t so green as to get an energy-saving frig. I’m just glad the refrigerator works and that the landlord promptly replaced the old one when it needed to be replaced. You can’t see the oven but it is an old model in what used to be called a dijon mustard color. It is beyond the refrigerator on the left. It is second hand because our landlord used it in his house before moving it here. Inbetween the frig and oven I’ve shoved a needle thin shelving unit which serves as our pantry. There are a couple of shelves over the oven for storage of pasta and spices and rice but with the exception of the bottom one they’re too high to conveniently reach.
The needle thin shelving unit stores mostly beans. We eat lots of beans.
I like our water purifier, which is sitting on top of the microwave. That’s second hand, acquired from a sister of mine. Still works beautifully.
Anyway, there, in front of the microwave, take a gander of our food preparation area. That’s it. Please don’t suggest that we try to hoist the microwave up and hang it from the wall. Won’t work. We put in a shelf above the microwave (which you can’t see here) and that ancient wall is made so well and is so hard that it was almost impossible to install that shelf even with the use of a battery-powered drill bit.
We can’t put anything else beside the rear door as we need to get in and out of it. Our kitchen garbage can is between the door and the derelict cabinet upon which is the microwave and there is simply no way to put anything else back there.
Exhibit B
Exhibit B of our lack of counter room. I suppose we could dispense with the dishrack and get a folding one. That would be one way of helping with the counter space issue, except when we’re cooking on the range we store our two big pots in the dishrack because there’s no where else to put them. Other pots, as you can see, we hang on the wall. Y’know how kitchens look wonderful in the Ikea catalogue pages with pots and other things hanging in wondrous gleaming organized glory from the wall? Did I even begin to fantasize our kitchen would gleam? No.
Indeedy, those are paper towels up above the sink. They are recycled. The plastic packaging in which they come says Green, 100% Recycled. Every so often I try using cut up bath towels and then return to being a bad person again, but I do have stored under the sink several old bath towels should the urge hit again. They are like twenty year old bath towels. Second hand. That’s because until six months ago all our bath towels used to be everyone else’s rejects. When others got rid of their bath towels because they were too old, we’d take ’em and use them for another ten years. But now we have Ikea bath towels because finally, in our long long marriage, we decided to treat ourselves to some new bath towels. Because some times it’s just plain nice to have new things. Especially new things like bath towels. And because six months ago we accidentally left a load of our old bath towels at the laundromat, which demanded we get new ones.
“How do they wash dishes with that roll around storage thingy in front of the sink?”
Yeah, it’s a pain, but we needed somewhere to have a crock pot and other general storage for water and dishes that don’t fit in the cabinet above the sink and because we keep some dishes down there so H.o.p. can easily reach them.
How perceptive of you! Yes, above the kitchen sink is a small picture of the Last Supper in front of a blown-up image of police advancing on a citizen during a 60s protest (we’ve had that protest pic for years because it looks like my MIL being advanced upon by the riot squad, except she would never have been anywhere near a protest, for which reason it’s funny, and lest you think I was being mean in treasuring this, my BIL was the one who found and gave this to us). Lots of postcards of the desert, because I like the desert. They keep falling down and I keep taping them back.
As for the Last Supper, a one-time neighbor saw it and knew we’d appreciate its weird mirrored finish. The kitchen seemed like a great place to put the Last Supper. It had once been in the bathroom but I was worried about offending some people who were coming to visit, thinking they might not like seeing the Last Supper in the bathroom. And being a sensitive sort, I moved it.
Exhibit C
I suppose some people don’t understand that I have a sense of humor. Especially on days like today. Maybe the past several months (years) in general. But I do. I’ve got a sense of humor.
There you have it. Our kitchen. If you have any cheap cheap ideas for how we can get some food prep counter space, I’d appreciate it.
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