In July of 2005, I first stepped into the room that would become my farmhouse kitchen. It was so long ago that I was carrying a digital camera with me, I hadn’t seen a smartphone yet.
I walked through the house, taking photos so that we could look at them later, so that we would remember the details from each room of this big empty house. It was a rainy, dreary day outside. The house was empty. The air was stale and hot in a house that had been abandoned for months. I walked through the doorway of the kitchen, looked to my right, and saw this.
When I look at this grainy photo now, I see all the flaws. I see the refrigerator that needed to be replaced immediately. I see the dirt and grime on the brick wall. You can see the dents and dings on the outside of the refrigerator’s body. Thankfully, I didn’t take a photo of the inside. I can still remember the horrible smell that lurked inside. Yikes.
I was taken by the double wall oven. I had never baked in a kitchen with a wall oven, much less a double wall oven. It reminded me of watching Julia Child slide baking sheets in and out of her double wall oven on PBS. I was too foolish to measure it and discover that it was so narrow that you couldn’t fit a standard sized cookie sheet or a roasting pan inside.
I’d discover that much later, right about the time that I had cookies ready to put into the oven, that it was too small for baking much of anything. I went to slide a cookie sheet into the preheated oven and realized that it simply wasn’t going to happen. So, I moved those cookies to quarter sheets and baked them. It took longer to bake cookies 6 at a time, but I embraced it.
The kitchen also had a Jenn-Air downdraft cooktop. It had inserts for a griddle to make pancakes, a grill with faux charcoal stones underneath for burger night, and smooth ceramic top burners. I couldn’t wait to use every single one of them.
When I did, I discovered that the griddle didn’t heat evenly and that the burger grill made a mess that required an hour of greasy cleanup. It looked great but worked poorly. So, I stuck with the ceramic cooktop. It worked well and gave me four working burners: two big and two small. When one, and then two, of the ceramic inserts stopped working, I called the old-fashioned coil burner inserts into duty. They’ve been working for me for a few years now, but I am ready to trade them in for something a bit more functional.
The first winter, I discovered that cold New England air had a free pass up through the downdraft pipe and right into the kitchen. It was like having a fan blowing freezing cold air into the house. So, I devised a makeshift cover for the downdraft and resigned myself to the fact that I couldn’t use it during the winter. Another lesson learned.
Then, as often happens with a house, we got busy living here and the idea of making a drastic change that wasn’t a necessity continued to be pushed off into the future. There was an old boiler to replace, insulation to add to the hollow walls, and always something that needed immediate repair. The kitchen’s aesthetics would have to wait. And so, they did.
I painted the cabinets more than once. For some reason, I decided that bright red was a good color. It was striking, but a bit too much. We lived with that for a bit before I moved on to blue.
I removed the tiles from the backsplash. I repaired old plaster walls. I replaced the light fixtures and restored the butcher block countertop on the island. I even took a reciprocating saw to a troublingly small extension on the kitchen island one weekend when my husband was away on a business trip. He came home to discover a piece of the island missing and that I had taken a large cabinet down from its original spot and relocated it to another. It was quite a shock, but an improvement all around.
Around that time, the tiny wall ovens stopped working completely, so I found a full-size double wall oven at our local Habitat for Humanity ReStore and brought them home. Of course, they wouldn’t fit in the space that had been occupied by the tiny wall ovens. So, I relocated the refrigerator, installed a new line for the ice maker, and put in a new electrical connection for the wall ovens. They have served us well, but they have started to become unreliable and one of them needs to have the display and convection fans replaced. It’s time for them to be retired.
I’ve been searching for a range or wall oven to replace them. I haven’t found what I am looking for, but my search continues. I’ll keep looking until I find something that is just right for this old farmhouse and for me.
This kitchen has never been perfect, but I knew that none of them are. The most beautiful farmhouse kitchens I see on Pinterest aren’t really perfect, although they sure are pretty to look at. I’m not aiming for perfect. I’m just hoping to turn the kitchen that I fell in love with all those years ago into a space that serves us well and allows me to keep baking and cooking, preferably with full size cookie sheets.
I have been collecting ideas and drawing up possibilities for this kitchen for years now. I have a stack of paint chips, photos from magazines, screenshots on my phone, and a new cordless reciprocating saw just in case I need it. Now it is time to move my drawings and ideas closer to reality.
There’s so much to be done that it can be difficult to choose a starting point. Replacing the ovens that have become unreliable and noisy seems like as good a place to start as any.
Of course, I have decided to replace the ovens in a way that isn’t quite as simple as it may sound. I’m not merely removing one appliance and replacing it with another. I am reimagining where the oven will be installed and doing all the electrical work myself. So, there’s a bit of planning to be done before I can jump into the actual work of bringing it all together.
The next time I share my progress in the kitchen with you, I hope to have a new and fully functional oven. I’ll also have information to share with you about the next step in my kitchen project. I haven’t mentioned what I intend to do about the cooktop and we haven’t even started talking about the sink and countertop.
I have a lot of work to get done, so I better get started!
Want to learn more about this old farmhouse we call 1840 Farm? You can read about moving to the farmhouse, building a chicken coop, adding the first farm animals to our land, being profiled in Real Simple Magazine, bringing home our beloved rescue pup Penny Lane, and turning this old abandoned farmhouse into the place we call home sweet home.