Open House: Kitchen & Dining Room

I’m participating in the Open House hosted by the 4 Moms, 35 Kids. Throughout the month of August, they are giving a glimpse into their homes and how they manage things for their larger-than-average families.  Last week’s area was outside yard and entry.

This week we are looking at what we call “the big three” – the dining/living room, and the kitchen.  We spend the majority of our days in this part of the house – cooking, eating, schooling, reading, playing.  You will also see that there is painting and other little details to finish.  We’re working on that, but slowly.  After all – the first four letters of PAINting describe it all!

This first picture is what you would see after you’d stepped inside our home – our dining/living room is right off the main entry.  There’s two tables together here for a total of 9.5 feet of table length.  We are looking around for a table that is about 8 feet long and a little wider than this – then we could gain 1.5 feet of space, and seat 2 people at each end of the table.  I’ll explain the seemingly levitated child’s chair in a minute.

Here is the living room as seen from the head of the table – this room is about 30 feet long.  Besides eating, we do a lot of writing, drawing, and games at this table – the children will sit here and draw as either my husband or I read aloud, while the younger children will play on the living room carpet.  More on this next week…  The kitchen is the yellow room off to the right.

Here I’m standing in the living room, looking toward the entryway.  Yes, there is a big unpainted spot there on the wall – we’re working on that.  The dogs’ crates usually go in the empty spot under the whiteboard.  The bench is one of four benches that my husband made in one afternoon years ago, with a chainsaw and some true 2-inch southern yellow pine that he had milled from trees on our property.  The little chair fits on top of the end of the bench perfectly, and functions as a booster seat for Sarah.  We have just enough room for our family to sit here, so when we have company, we are either outside, or everyone will spill over into the living room and, as we say, “is welcome to sit wherever.”

Let’s go into the kitchen, shall we?  This slab of lumber on the wall is Florida white cedar – it’s the back part of what we call “the kitchen ledge.”  For a few years we had a small custom lumber business, and we built this ledge ourselves.  It’s pretty bare in this picture, but, trust me – it’s such a convenient clutter spot that it made it onto our afternoon chores list.  Right now there is one lone 2-quart jar of culturing kefir, but…

This is my favorite way of decorating the kitchen – with all sorts of yummy real food I’m experimenting with.  Here’s some lacto-fermented regulars I make: catsup, and sauerkraut.

Here’s the kitchen as seen from the doorway.  Before we look around, I have to say this is much different from the original kitchen, which had white laminated cabinets, white laminated countertops, and linoleum floor.  My parents remodeled the house for us, and things changed drastically.  The room through the wide doorway is “the kitchen addition” or “the pantry” – we’ll get there in a minute.

We now have hickory cabinets, and lots of them.  The wall cabinets are 42 inches high, so the “up-high” parts need a step-stool, but the extra storage space has come in handy.  And don’t you just love my fancy drainer?  It’s a bath towel folded double on the counter.  I gave up trying to find a dish drainer large enough to hold our huge pots and pans.  Yes, we have two full-size ranges, and yes – we love them.

In fact, after I took these pictures, Jonathan got busy making “pizzadillas” – similar to quesadillas, but with pizza ingredients.  There’s more than enough room for our large cast iron pans.  We love cast iron, and these 2 griddles and 15-inch skillet usually just live on the stoves because we use them every day.

Having two ovens is a real bonus on baking days.

If you look above the cabinets you’ll see an opening in the wall – there used to be a doorway there – I’ve mentioned remodeling, right?  The layout of the kitchen before was…interesting.  This is much better use of the space.  One of our refrigerators is in here – we have two, along with a chest freezer.  The “second fridge” is in another living area we’ll see next week – the library.

On the other side of the kitchen is “the long counter” where we keep all of our big cooking appliances, for now – I still have some rearranging to do.  It’s very nice when this counter is clear.  The cups next to the fridge are something new I’m trying.  Each child has a plastic cup with their name on it.  They use that cup – and only that cup – for their drinks throughout the day.  This has solved a problem of not having enough clean cups/glasses ready for meals.  Oh, and there’s my home management notebook – that I can’t even close because it’s so stuffed full of ideas and scribbles… Moving on…

A friend of mine gave me this fantastic shelf.  I’m still in awe of how much it can hold – I think the weight limit per shelf is 600 pounds.  PERFECT for our cast iron, and the numerous bags of grain and beans that we keep on hand.  It came with S hooks, too – lots of them.   The two units on either side of the metal shelf are recycled from an old multimedia entertainment center we had.  They work well at housing a tiny fridge, with onions and potatoes in the drawers.  The smaller unit holds cookbooks, and there’s a 50 lb bag of diatomaceous earth in the cabinet under those.

Here’s the pantry, and I will be honest and say it did NOT look like this yesterday morning.  It has a tendency to “avalanche” all too easily if we are not diligent.  Our wheat grinder is in here, along with more shelves made from our own lumber.  This pine also came from trees knocked down in our property during the 2004 hurricanes.

The other side of the pantry; our massive meat grinder is here that we use when we make our own sausage.  There’s more of our natural cedar trim under the window.  We love that stuff.

Here’s the view looking from the pantry out towards the living room.  When we have company, we set up a buffet on the island, keeping hot food on the stoves, and there’s water and ice dispensed from the fridge, so it’s very easy to move a lot of people through here comfortably.

Before we leave this part of the tour, let’s pretend there’s a different decoration on the ledge – sprouting grains and asparagus plumes.

OK – pizzadillas are done – time to unload dishwasher and “drainer”, set table, make a salad – photo shoot is over!

Come back next week for a close-up tour of our living room, family room, and library/school room.

Be sure to visit all of the 4 Moms, 35 Kids to see their kitchen/dining room areas:

• Smockity Frocks
• The Common Room
• Life in a Shoe
• Raising Olives