The Kitchn Archive: May 2018

About five years ago my husband and I bought an old, decrepit house, and renovated it top to bottom. (My whole renovation story is here, if you want to see!) Part of that renovation included adding on an open kitchen that we outfitted with a semi-custom IKEA kitchen. I loved designing my kitchen from scratch, and we saved a ton of money by doing most of the design and work ourselves.

If you’re a practical person and invested in high-quality tableware in classic white, good for you! Your dinner guests will have to look long and hard to spy those tiny chips your plates may have accumulated over the years. For the rest of us who opted for brightly colored vintage dishes, which we have to constantly protect with our lives, we need all the help we can get to keep our priceless pieces looking pristine. So what help do we offer? What ingenious tip have we? Ready for it?

Buying your first home is an exciting and arcane process — I know, because we just did it! Especially if you’re coming from an apartment or a rental, the ins and outs of taking care of your own space can be, well, all new. The room where this may be most evident? In the kitchen, where all those appliances, plumbing, and storage issues come together to create a zone that’s more prone to needing work than other, less-complicated rooms in the home.

When people talk about rental (or very basic) kitchens, there’s one thing they love to complain about the most: the absence of the oh-so-covetable dishwasher. And while I do think it’d be nice to have a machine that’ll clean my dirty plates for me (especially when I’m washing the 12th water glass and only two people live in my apartment), there’s one thing I’d actually rather have, if I were to find myself in an either-or scenario.

What’s the best remedy for two competing patterns of speckled stone in a kitchen? Sometimes the answer is a third, completely different material. Can you believe this is the same kitchen? It’s so pretty! And those cabinets — is that middle upper cabinet an ingeniously disguised range hood? The marble walls are pure luxury, and that wonderful blue brings out such interesting hues in the stone. Also, that stove is classic and covetable. Sigh.

Continuing the love-fest for all things British, we reached out to our Brit friends to see what kitchen brands we may be missing out on. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of the world wide web and international shipping, most British and European brands are fairly accessible Stateside. But there are a few that are pretty rare over here. Here are the five brands that came up the most in our informal poll.

The other week, we ran a post with instructions detailing how to pack up dishes and glassware for a move. To do it, we teamed up with Lior Rachmany, the CEO and founder of Brooklyn-based Dumbo Moving + Storage. He’s moved more than 6,000 apartments throughout his career, so he had a ton of smart tips and points. One really stuck with us more than the others, though.

This project has so much going for it: It was done for less than $200, it was done in a rental, and it features faux DIY granite countertops and a covetable KitchenAid! (Mixer obviously not included in the $200 total.) Click through and get dangerously inspired. The pink + celadon + white + gold combination is comfortingly and charmingly vintage, but the clean lines of the cabinet doors, handles, and subway tiles keep things modern.

My favorite way to use Airbnb has nothing to with actually booking trips: I just like to peek into people’s perfectly styled homes and see how people live. You can almost always get a good idea or three just from looking at photos. Here are seven organizing tricks we learned during a recent trip through some British Airbnbs. Open shelves full of food packaging look messy — but put dry goods into containers (either glass or opaque) and, all of a sudden, they become artful.

The funky name of this cleaner (which, let's be real, is totally part of its charm) alludes to its somewhat surprising ingredients.

My fridge problem isn’t the physical act of cleaning it out; I do that every now and then without trouble. The real issue is keeping it organized and functional for more than a week or two at a time. The whole beautiful array of fresh veggies and lined-up condiments will slowly turn into a jumbled clutter that hides almost-expired products and allows containers of leftovers to grow their own ecosystems in the back.

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a million times. Editors and designers love to tell people to switch out their cabinet hardware for a low-effort, high-impact change in the kitchen. They call knobs and pulls “jewelry for the kitchen” and talk about it like it’s as easy as changing your, uh, necklace.