Monday, June 30, 2014

Multipurpose kitchen eating area

Before:  
When we first moved into the house I painted the walls yellow, I'm not sure what color they were originally. They were dirty and smelled is all I can remember.

I also painted the cabinets white when we moved in and spray painted the handles red. I wish I had a before before picture, but there were no lights working when we moved in so I wouldn't have been able to get a good picture.

Kitchen Eating area

 


 AFTER:

This space has changed A LOT since we first moved in and is a continual work in progress to make the most of the space we have to work with. It is a little more crowded then I would like, but with the space we have in our house some things are going to be a little crowded and somewhat cluttered.
Stick on White Board: This is one of those whiteboard stickers I got from a hardware store. I found that when I erased anything off the board the door became very dirty and black. I painted with acrylic paints around the white board this frame to keep the door from looking dingy. Dried acrylic paint is very easy to clean, so it works great! This small white board is great for to-do lists, notes, reminders and such.
On the wall next to the door I bought a small white board that has the days of the week, I put our families schedule on it every week so I can glance at it or add things to it easily throughout the week.
I'm not very fond of all the bags under the small white board, but I'm not sure where else to store these bags so I can easily grab them before walking out the door.
I added these shelves to add more storage when we moved in to this house. Recently I added another shelf to it to create even more storage. I also moved my sons schedule to below the shelves so all his educational things were in one area.
I also changed the hardware on the kitchen cabinets, and added the rectangles to the cabinet face.
The play kitchen is from IKEA, it is wonderful and a great way to keep my little ones entertained while I am cooking.

This kitchen table is currently in its smallest size, but can have a leaf put in to be a larger table. I like it being smaller so I can get to the whiteboard during our school time.
For mothers day I got the basket on the table to put the materials we use everyday. My family also bought me the floating shelves for mothers day. I love them!

This whiteboard was free! Our church was having a work day and was replacing all their whiteboards with new ones and were going to throw these away and my wonderful husband was able to get one! (Thankfully it fit on this wall!) I attached cork squares to part of the white board to put my sons daily work on display. I also put clothespins on the sides with double stick foam tape for additional places to hang artwork and such. This whiteboard is not magnetic, so I use ticky tacky (that blue sticky stuff).



Calendar and shelf wall













 STORAGE: My husband built this bench that I use for our resources for school that we don't use on a daily basis. I found these great plastic totes with handles in the garden section at Walmart that have been wonderful in separating our materials into a crafts bin, alphabet, preschool and kindergarten books.

I really enjoy this area now and all the different uses we get out of this relatively small space.