The Play Kitchen

We gave Henry this play kitchen for his birthday. He plays with it a bit once or twice a day. He sometimes needs some suggestions about what to do. And he mostly likes looking through the food and pretending to eat it.

There is a before picture of this cabinet that I made the kitchen from somewhere on the computer but since I started the project back in September I don't want to look through for it. But it was a TV cabinet that I turned on its side and changed up a bit. There was actually quite a bit of cutting and screwing - changing one big door into two, making that top shelf smaller to keep room for playing, adding shelves inside the oven and fridge, and cutting a hole for the sink. There was even some soldering as that was honestly the only way I could imagine to do the faucet affordably in a way that I liked - it is some elbows and short pieces of copper pipe soldered together. I stapled that fabric on the back to be the backsplash, that perfect fabric just happened to be in my stash of fabric.

And then searching for pots and pans and cutlery and crockery took awhile. We found most of it at thrift stores, I was especially pleased with the Sesame Street plates I found. And Kevin and I made some felt food as well (so fun when the husband wants to make crafts with me!). And I did buy some velcro cutting food. His favourites are the cutting food and the pasta.

And I managed to squeeze it into our kitchen. That was important for me because I had this image in my head of us cooking together each in our own kitchens which has actually happened a few times.

And now that huge project is over. It turned out to be a lot of work but all of it fun (except painting). It was just the perfect project, simple enough that I could just figure out how to do things on my own (with lots of insipration from google) but the culmination of all that work is a pretty big thing I think - a play kitchen with doors on hinges and knobs that turn and Henry knew just what it was as soon as he saw it. And after a week and a half of playing nothing is breaking yet!