Play Kitchen

About four months ago I started a project. You know how that goes.

It all started when I saw how much the boys loved playing with the pretend food at our local library. So I decided to make some felt food for the kiddos to play with at home. Benji always wants to help me in the kitchen so I figured this would be a no-brainer toy that would get a lot of use. 

Which it does. I had a blast making pancakes, eggs, noodles, bacon -- and the boys have spent lots of time cooking up many creative breakfasts, sandwiches and pizzas.

After the popularity of the felt food, I started to see lots of cute diy play kitchens on Pinterest and immediately thought I could do that. That's when I came home with this little computer desk from the Salvation Army for like $6 way back in October. 

Travis cut out a hole for the sink (we used a silver bowl), we painted it a fun shade of green and mounted an old faucet - with a bonus detachable nozzle - we also found at the thrift store. 

Ta Da! 

And that's how our play kitchen remained -- for many months...

The boys didn't seem to mind though. I often found them playing with the felt food or pretending they were spraying each other with the sink nozzle or just using it as a hideout. 

But I still had big plans to make this little kitchen even better.

Which I finally got around to doing...a little over four months later...this past weekend. True, we've added parts bit by bit but I think we can finally say we are DONE with it. Maybe because I'm feeling the urge to finish a bunch of half-completed projects before the baby comes.

Anyway, here's the finished product:

a cute little kitchen for our pint-sized cooks

We added screw-in-hooks to the sides (and insides) to hang pots and pans and used vinyl cutouts for the stove range. I also sewed a curtain using one of Travis' old dress shirts and hung it on a tension rod. I'm actually pretty excited with how this turned out as I kept the original button-down front as the opening in the middle.

Our little chefs have had a great time cooking up all kinds of delicious meals for us. 

 And check out those little working stove knobs on the side -- our favorite resident engineer decided we needed actual turning knobs and put these bad boys together using potentiometers (you'll have to ask Trav) and some hot glue.

I'm quite pleased with how it all turned out, despite the fact that it took us so long to finish; I'm blaming it on the pregnancy. That said, the kids love it. Benji got more play food for Christmas and I've been slowly raiding my cabinets for spare spoons and measuring cups. If nothing else, I had fun with this project and hope we will get many years of play out of it. Best of all, we hardly spent any money making on it. Maybe $25? Almost half of which was for paint.

And now, we get to play with our food whenever we like.