Small houses... how do you function in the kitchen?

CJ, that's a great plan to sacrifice the dining room and make a bigger eat-in type kitchen. I would do that in a heartbeat, too!

Hi CJ,

Didn't mean to suggest that the rv is ideal. We would really like a bigger kitchen. Just don't have it and have to make do with what we have right now.

I think I misunderstood your original post (sorry about that, my fault) and was thinking that you thought that unless you had a huge kitchen, you could do very little towards preserving the harvest. I went back and reread...

My wife has been wanting a "real" kitchen for years. And I would like one, too, though I do kinda like the idea of an outdoor kitchen for stuff like canning. We have an area in mind, now if we can just fine THE property that fits...

Good luck!

I'm with you on the dining room becoming part of the kitchen. Never understood "living room" and "front room". I'm all for a "Great room". My kitchen is considered large. But I store most of the canning and cooking supplys in both the pantry and the laundry room. Pots hang from racks, 1 over the vintage gas stove with my copper, 1 near the wood cookstove with cast iorn. We have very few cupords but have antiques like Hooiser, oak ice box and oak china cab. and these cannot hold any large items. So, I do cook a lot outside(summer), not so much that I have no room, but because of the heat. We built a large Harvest table (2" thick Ash with 5 antique thick legs)for working inside, it serves as a huge workspace. I bought a large piece of fancy plastic table "cloth" to cover it when I do things like making noodles, butchering ect. Very sturdy.

I did build a cookhouse for my woodstove when we stayed in our 5th wheel.ps, I made the pantry out of the laundry room and gave up the walk in closet in our bedroom for it to become the laundry room. Maybe you can change a bedroom into a "storage" room.

Bellyman, I feel for you both. I know an RV is doable and we'll probably be doing it again if we buy this place, and live in it while we remodel. I can function just fine in the RV kitchen, keeping in mind that it's not a FARM kitchen, and I can't prepare and stock a pantry with an RV kitchen.

Many folks are really into "tiny" homes these days, but for a sustainable life I really don't see how that works? To raise/grow the bulk of your own food requires both equipment and a place to store it and your food.

I don't require a huge house, but a huge kitchen is kind of high up there for me When we process deer for example, will use every bit of available counter and floor space in our current kitchen, it's really cramped to make it work. I don't think I'd want to tackle something like that outside due to sanitary reasons.

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7thswan, with that enclosed back porch, it would suffice as a storage room so that would work out just fine. It's not cooled though, so we'd still need to build a root cellar. I could use the 3rd bedroom as a pantry, but we'd have no guest room then. At some point, we expect my parent to move in with us, unless we set up a mobile home for them.

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We have a large pantry we store all the kitchen extras in.

Hey CJ,
If you and the dh decide not to buy it, could you let us know, such as which co? We don't want to be too far from Rville.
We found a house in Dover we liked, but pp taxes are 1700 yr. We can find a comparable home with more land for 400-500 yr. pp taxes in Yell or Johnson co.
Thanks and good luck with your decision.

We live in a 700 square foot house. Our kitchen is tiny and we have little to no indoor storage. Some kitchen equipment we store outdoors, but mostly we've gotten very efficient about what we really need. Food storage is always an issue, but we live in Vermont so for many months, we can put food into unheated outbuildings and it is fine (well, unless you don't want it to freeze). We also have friends who have a root cellar with extra room, so a lot of our root crops go over to their place. When I harvest, I package everything in two-week supplies, and then every couple of weeks I go get a package. I also second the "summer kitchen" idea. We do a lot of our warm-weather cooking and especially food processing outdoors. It is cleaner, keeps the house cooler and you just have a lot more space.

In growing up, my family (consisting of 1 set of grandparents, both parents and 4 of us kids, and many times a uncle) all lived in a 1300 sq foot house, with a standard 10 foot long galley kitchen.
and one small bathroom. We always had a big garden and Mom, Grandma and usually a couple of kids would can everything in the fall.

All depends on what you are used to, now we did have a basement for the cans, but they just as easily would have gone on shelves in a closet (which is where we keep our supplies now)

Other than for the extremely rich, big houses are a very recent thing.

Sure you could, people for centuries have done wonders in kitchens that small and smaller, you just don't want to - and I don't blame you, you're used to more, you want more and no doubt can afford more, but you COULD do it.

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I prefer to have a separate dining room because I can’t eat while looking at the mess in the kitchen. I love my current kitchen. It’s not large but it’s not small. I have enough counter space to do anything. I have a wall oven, which I love. We are moving to a smaller house and the kitchen tears my heart out. We have carefully redesigned it to make it doable for us, since it has to be gutted anyway. The upper cabinets are staying and I just got my custom made lower cabinets, 10 feet with the sink, which I’m painting. We’ll have another counter for prepping, and another counter for small appliances.

I think an 8 x 10 kitchen is doable if it is in a U shape. If it isn’t, bust down the wall.

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Learn to decorate ones home with canners, mixer,bowls, and dry goods
I have a wood stove and a house hooked to a sink with a bucket under the sink with a hose hooked to a sump pump hooked into my sewer drain system. It is not petty but it is better than the third world. I cook and we have made it because we make do. Some day ....ok year..I will have a real home.

Our house is about 650 sq ft., kitchen is 8x10 and we're able to do anything we need in there. I could use more counter space, but we stuck an island with a 2x3 top in the middle of the kitchen that serves as my counter space. We store our less oft used appliances in the attic and just go up to get them when we need them. The stuff we use regularly, we tend to store on top of the cabinets, using all the vertical space we can. I really think I'll just be getting rid of a lot of small appliances when we have a kitchen with more storage space, as I found I really don't need them all that much (if it's too much trouble to climb up to the attic to get it, I probably don't actually need it ) Our kitchen isn't particularly pleasing to the eye, but it does do the job.

So with these tiny kitchens and tiny homes, family gardens and hunters, where does a person store a couple thousand jars of canned food? I'm just not seeing it!

When I make pasta, I have to move everything off the counter onto the breakfast bar (a pain, but doable) now. It's the only space I have, and my kitchen is 10 x 16 (way too small).


Sure I could make a smaller kitchen work, but not and do the things that I do in mine.

I disagree that smaller homes were the norm until recently. In the past, there were several generations sharing a home, and they were larger and more functional. Small homes are a MODERN thing. McMansions are simply a stupid thing, they are just a huge amount of non functional space meant for a single family.

Right now we heat and cool our garage (it's insulated) and 2 entire walls are lined with shelves and freezers, floor to ceiling with stocked food. We've always lived that way, since hubby is a contractor and we've had quite a few spells where he's been out of work for 6 months at a time.

Our kitchen cabinets go all the way to the ceiling. I keep my smallest, most used canner on top the fridge.

Sorry... I don't mean to sound so grumpy, I'm just getting very frustrated looking at homes with kitchens I can't figure out how to function in. I probably should start going through my "stuff" and figure out what isn't essential... but that's going to be like cutting off fingers and toes!

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((((hugs)))) I felt the same way when I moved out of my enormous kitchen and into a much smaller one. I think storage for the things you can up can really be an issue, for sure.

As far as having space to make up your pasta - would you have room in the new place where you could set up a folding table where you could lay things out?

CJ,

Your quest for counter space... I understand completely. And I agree that there are a LOT of homes built in the last 50+ years that just do not have much of a kitchen. The average American barely cooks anymore, let along the kinds of things you're doing and wanting to do. That means that the average "cookie cutter" home probably has just enough of a kitchen to make a suburbanite think they see a wonderful kitchen because it has lots of sparkly things in all the right places.

One thing that did come to mind, though, was the idea that your thousand jars and all of your canning equipment, milling equipment, etc, need be in your kitchen. We lived in an old farm house years ago that had a fairly small kitchen but was connected to a "mud room" (for lack of a better name) where there was plenty of room for almost anything we would want, including hundreds of jars of canned food, a couple of chest freezers, a refrigerator dedicated to just eggs (we had a large flock of chickens at the time), canners, juicers, grain mill, food grinder and probably many other things that slip my mind. But it was a small kitchen.

Just a thought. And I hope I don't seem like I'm picking on you. I admire you for what you do and want to do.

My house is a bit larger than the OP's and my kitchen is tiny and inadequate. I've lived in older, smaller homes with bigger kitchens. We have no basement, no pantry and no room to leave out the KitchenAid or the bread machine. They're stored on a wheeled cart in the...living room. Yuck.

Barely room for the microwave, toaster, and coffeemaker.

Small kitchens are hard to deal with. And bumping an exterior wall would cost too much, not to mention skyrocket the taxes.

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No, I don't expect to keep any food in the kitchen, I don't now, except spices and baking ingredients. But when a home has a miniature kitchen, no pantry and no garage, where do these farmers store their food? Surely they aren't running to town several days a week? Back when we had our farm in Missouri, I went to town once a month.

Anyway, I'd totally get these kitchens if these homes were in town, but these are farmhouse we're looking at. I could go see any number of houses in the city with great kitchens (that probably are just for show)... it makes no sense to me at all.

How can you have a 2 acre garden, run cattle and have chickens, and deal with that food? I'm baffled! LOL

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The root cellar or the basement.

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~*~Erin~*~
SAHM, ranch wife, sub and quilt shop proprietress
the Back Gate Country Quilt Shop

I'm not going to lie to you. When I'm doing something that requires tons of counter space like what you pictured above, it spills over. I use my kids' table and the coffee table to make up the difference. It isn't the most functional way to do things, but it can be done.

None of these places we've looked at have either.

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