Like every other room in our 1917 American Foursquare, the kitchen is…well…square. Yes, there are four walls, but how much space these four walls provide is quite questionable. In this one room alone, there are five doors and two windows!
The Pantry
For the most part, we use the pantry as our cooking and storage area. It has counterspace and cupboards, but it’s crowded! For a two-chef family, as we often are, it’s even more crowded!
The Kitchen
While the pantry isn’t conducive to the gathering of family and friends, the kitchen certainly is. Long before we lived here, it was used as the main room of the house. The elderly couple before us kept a daybed, table and TV in the kitchen.
Next to the sink is the doorway to the pantry. And yes, that’s a mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink! When we bought the house 20 years ago, I said that was going to be one of the first things to go. Somewhere along the way, something happened.
The cookstove is original to the kitchen. It’s a Monarch Malleable woodburning stove, from Beaver Dam, WI. It creates such a warm, cozy ambiance. No, I don’t regularly use it for cooking – I have enough trouble using a conventional stove! But we’ve baked in it once a while for novelty’s sake.
Oh…And that’s Clyde, our renovation mascot!
The art on the wall is a print by American folk artist Doris Lee. We like to think her kitchen scene shares many similarities with ours. And the table? My father-in-law made it for us the year my husband and I turned 30. Like, um, last year? Not.
So, there you have it…this was our kitchen for the first twenty years we’ve lived here. So many memories and happy times! And now the time has come for a few new walls—new walls with new tales to tell. May they be as good as the old!