My Kitchen Woes

     Most of you know that Frenchie and I recently bought an old chalet up in the mountains of Le Bonhomme, France. This is in the Alsace region. It is an old vacation chalet that was built back at the beginning of the twentieth century as far as I can gather.

It was much smaller than it is now, basically half the house that we have. Sometime later they built on the second half and doubled the size. The base is made of concrete, the upper part brick and  wood. The older half having wood upstairs and the newer half brick covered in wood. 

I fell in love with this house the moment I went to look at it. It has a lot of character, very quirky, but I love that over a box house any day!

 Unfortunately it also came with a lot of problems. 

This is the kitchen that greeted me. As you can see the cabinets that were there were sitting on top of the counter or just in the middle of the room. It has a sloping roof and the base of the counter is concrete. No lower cabinets...only a hole with a curtain in front of it. It was also as dark as a cave. This is the brightest it would get and that was only in the sunniest part of the day...if there was sun. The light fixture did little to light the room.

I tried many organizing schemes. Here is a picture of one of them. I cut down the set of drawers that had been sitting in the middle of the kitchen and set them into the hole under the counter, then I built a few makeshift shelves and added baskets. This all needs to be reworked but it helped a lot. Then I set up that shelf mess on the counter. It was helpful for awhile to be able to find things and to have a place to put some things but it didn't last for long. Consider that a desperate temporary measure!

So now I am on the journey to making my kitchen into an organized, clean bright easy to work in space. I plan on posting my updates as I go along, Here is my first big overhaul.

 I painted the whole thing! I did not hold back even a second. All that wood...gone. Now normally I love the look of natural wood but this room needed bright white. I painted the under counter red for a temporary fix. I couldn't look at that dirty stucco another minute and nothing seemed to clean it. 

 It also ties into the red in the new addition ...

So now you can see what I am working on and what I am working with. It is quite the project but I do have some plans. My next project is shelves and pretty jars to put on those shelves. I will write more on that soon.

Hope you are all having a wonderful week, Diane

Here is a my first update on my next project to organize my kitchen.

Here is my second update on improving storage.