The Before

Like every other room in our 1917 American Foursquare, the kitchen is..well.. square. Yes, there are four walls, but how much space those four walls provide is quite questionable. In this one room alone, there are five doors and two windows!

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!

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 couple before us kept a daybed, table and TV in the kitchen. And yes, in the picture at the top of the page, that's a mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink!

The cookstove is original to the kitchen. It's a Monarch Malleable woodburning stove, from Beaver Dam, WI., and it creates 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.

So, there you have it...this was our kitchen for the first twenty years we 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!