Last year, like most people, we spent a LOT of time inside the house. Coincidentally, we also planned a gut renovation on our kitchen. Did we lose our minds in the process" Read on to find out! (PS, the answer is “yes”.)
Neither of us grew up with large kitchens. In both New York City and suburban London, kitchens were often added as an afterthought, often in whatever space was available between one room and another. It wasn’t until we moved out of the city, to Beacon, in the Hudson Valley, that we had more than just a few square feet of dedicated cooking space. Our kitchen in Brooklyn was so small that we had to make our own counter space by laying a cutting board over the sink. Even so, we managed to cook a full Thanksgiving dinner for 14 people in that kitchen, though I’m pretty sure it took several years off my life in the process.
Baby Matt in our tiny kitchen in Astoria, Queens in 2002. He cooked me a curry and I knew it was love.
When we decided to move to Beacon in 2012, the house we have now was actually the very first house we looked at to rent. “What a dump,” I thought, seeing only the peeling salmon-colored paint, moldy water marks and overgrown yard. That is, until we looked at the other houses available. (This one was a veritable palace in comparison.) It had two and a half bathrooms (!), great light, and the builder’s-grade kitchen felt huge compared to what we were used to. It wasn’t particularly pretty,...