A Kitchen Forcooks And Kids

摘要

We used to have a love/ hate relationship with our kitchen. Our house was built in 1937, and a mid-1970s remodel added 75 sq. ft., a bank of windows, and a skylight adjacent to the kitchen. This effort created a large, light-filled space, which sold us on the house; but like many poorly planned renovations, the added space lacked purpose and efficiency. It had a small work area along one wall, with some sagging bookshelves inset between the studs over a radiator. We filled the open space with a table and some chairs, adding an obstacle to traffic flow into and out of the house. In a display of useless redundancy, our seldom-used dining room a few feet away held another table and a set of chairs (floor plan p. 50). When our second child arrived, we felt our house begin to shrink. We had to find a way to open the rooms to one another and create a sense of spaciousness. And we needed to make better use of the spaces we already had, especially the sunny, underused corner by the kitchen.