Home Sweet Garage: Kitchen Ideas

Okay so I'm accummulating a bunch of ideas for what I want to do with our kitchen in the garage conversion. The space we will have for our kitchen will be approximately  - so it will be a very tight fit!! Luckily we're in a great position since DH's uncle owns a kitchen and bathroom renovation company. He's offered to custom build us the perfect kitchen and all we have to pay for is the materials; labour and all the upmarking he normally adds on top he's willing to give us completely free!
So the highest priority in this kitchen is going to be storage solutions. We need to manage to cram all of our kitchen gear into a very tight space, so nothing goes into this kitchen without the storage side of it being thoroughly investigated.

 

Drawers, drawers, everywhere. I read an article recently that said that drawers utilise 30% more storage space in kitchens. And no, I don't remember where I read this. Sorry. So I want pretty much no cupboards at all, just drawers. My MIL's two most recent kitchens had drawers everywhere, it was the first time I'd seen drawers being used so extensively in a kitchen but I loved it! It was so practical and much prettier, I intend on using drawers in every kitchen I build from now on!

 

I also plan on having a kitchen island on strong castor wheels so that when we're not in the kitchen we can push the island further into the kitchen and have more space in the living area. I especially like the island above that has the fold up bar with the bar stools. Now if only I could think of somehow to store the bar stools when they're not in use. Any suggestions?

 

I love, love, love this hidden kitchen design and have an idea to implement it in our kitchen to hide all the appliances. See, I love it when kitchen benches are completely clear with nothing on them, but we have a great deal of appliances that we regularly use which end up cluttering up our benches. So after talking extensively about my idea with my FIL, DH and DH's uncle I've come up with a brilliant solution: rather than the regular kitchen counter depth of 600mm, the counter along the back wall will be 900mm deep - the depth of a kitchen island. The extra 300mm along the back will make up an appliance cupboard with sliding doors along the front. The sliding doors will be made to look like a splashback so that it looks like it's simply the back of the kitchen, until you slide the splashback across and find all the hidden appliances :D I have heaps of ideas on how to make the splashback/sliding doors but that's a post all on its own!
There'll be 300mm of dead space behind the bench, but we're thinking that from the side of the bench we'll implement a slide out bin cabinet, and DH thinks we should put two access holes with sealed lids in the cabinet to throw our scraps/recycling out. We'll see :)


Of course we have heaps of different ideas and we're still in the planning stage so things may change at any time. Some of our ideas conflict with eachother too so we still need to make decisions on those items.
I'm constantly updating the Pinterest board, Home Sweet Garage, so be sure to check it out if you're interested in our plans!

Kiddy Time/Mummy Moments: Day 3

Yay, today went really well!! (picture me jumping up and down in glee!) Last night I had decided that I needed to centre our activities more on As interests to get him involved and actually enjoy spending time together (duh, pretty freaking obvious huh?)

Well I found a website that prints off large letters that look like roads do this morning I printed off a large capital A and a large B. A was so freaking excited when he saw them printing off that he didn't want to finish his breakfast before playing with them.
He got out all his matchbox cars and drove them all over the 'roads' with me for 15 minutes. I could see that he was starting to get a little distracted so I quickly finished up and packed it away before it ended negatively. Now that I know he enjoys it I think I'll laminate the whole alphabet so they're a bit stronger and bring out a couple of new letters every few days.

I had also printed off a couple of coloring pages of trucks I had found through google images so I brought them out next. He sat at the dining table and was quite happily coloring in for another 15 minutes before I duvked out to have a shower.

When I returned my MIL had put A in the pram and he was pretending to be baby Z, sucking his thumb and crying lol. I went along with it and we had a lot of fun making sure Baby was being looked after. This probably lasted about 30 minutes.

I pulled out his box of Lego and we sat on the couch together building trucks and trailers for an hour. He has plenty of Duplo Lego but we also let him play with the regular Lego while being supervised because he really enjoys it and he's extremely clever when it comes to his technical skills. I love to see how hard he's concentrating on what he's building and his fine motor skills are amazing, I'm always very impressed with the things he makes.

We then engaged in some more imaginative play, he decided we were both dogs and we were crawling around on the ground barking and playing tug of war. This game lasted well over an hour! And then he wanted to play it again tonight before bed :)

I was going to take him to the park again this afternoon but by the time we both woke from a nap it was too late in the day and the weather had turned. Instead I pulled out his Duplo and we sorted all his Duplo sets. A put everything in piles depending on whether it was a farm specific item, or from the police set or firefighter set. I was reading something today that said sorting is an early form of mathematical learning which is great because A loves sorting things!
We continued having free play with the Duplo and we ended up playing together for the next 3 hours!!

Even though I had to engage in a lot of imaginative play with him - which I normally hate - I actually really enjoyed the day. I think I'm just happy to finally be engaging with A like I always felt I should. I feel a lot better about myself (hey maybe I'm not going to be a crap mum anymore!!) although I feel much more tired!!
Tomorrow we're going to be going out for the day while DH has the day off so I probably won't bother posting. I'm going to try and go to the library with A and pick up some more bedtime books.