A record of Downsized Smaller Kitchen, Three Weeks In

Well, we have nearly been in this house for a month. How crazy is that?! We moved on the 14th of last month and this Sunday is the 14th again! The pod is all unpacked and picked up (you can listen in here about what the heck we overpacked & then donated when we got here). It is so crazy that a single pod of stuff can be too much – but then again, John was a pod-packing champion. Like too good at it. And going from 14 rooms to 6 (and 3150 square feet to 1400) is not a small challenge. I am not gonna sugarcoat it. This was a multiple month long undertaking. But it was SO WORTH IT.

In a nutshell: we do not miss anything that we do not have anymore and we are feeling so much lighter and loving it. Highly recommend. Ten stars. My biggest advice for anyone else who is majorly downsizing = get rid of even more than you think you need to on the front end, because you never miss it on the back end.

We also talked about the part of moving into a smaller home that we did not expect in that podcast episode, so it’ll catch you up a ton about the actual mechanics of the move, how we settled in, what surprised us, etc.

But let us get into the lively visual stuff: a bunch of photos of our kitchen/dining room/random little seating area as it looks right now. This is one large room that creates a multi-functional common area in the middle of our main floor. This house is in short like a ranch with all the bedrooms and the bathroom on the first floor and a bonus flex space upstairs that we use as a family room/office (sort of like how plenty of ranches might have a big flex space in the basement except ours is upstairs instead of downstairs).

This is simply us using stuff that we already own, all of which was in the pod (well, we ordered two more kitchen chairs but that is it) and showing you how everything landed. We enjoy documenting this because it is lively to watch how things evolve, and also a fairly interesting study in how some areas of a home seem to take forever to figure out while others settle fairly swiftly and work simply like that for a quite long time.

Simply for lively, here is the kitchen as it looked when we picked up the house (you can read more about removing the peninsula & the soffits here & see how we refinished the pine floors to be a lot lighter and less orange here).

Those changes alone were a large improvement – along with painting the whole room white for a brighter feeling (the whole house is Pure White by Sherwin Williams – eggshell on the walls, semi gloss on the trim/doors, and flat on the ceiling). It was especially dark and rainy when we offered on this house so all of our before pictures are SO BLEAK and we assumed it was simply a smaller house that might simply need a lot of brought in lighting because it was not naturally quite bright (but that was a price we’d pay to live in such a strong walkable neighborhood near the beach)… and then we moved in and were like HOLY CRAP THIS IS THE BRIGHTEST HOUSE WE HAVE EVER OWNED (you can read more about our quite strange accidental tradition of buying a house in the rain here).

This video will answer like 10 of your questions, from “what is behind that door near the stove?” to “wait but will you lose that side kitchen window if you add an en-suite bathroom for your bedroom to that side porch area?” and “how do you like having the downstairs common area between your bedroom and the kids bedrooms?” and “you do not have a pantry here – where do you store all the food?” It is all in here for ya, and a lot of that stuff can be seen without needing to have the sound on – simply watch me open stuff and look inside ;)

Note: You can also view the video on YouTube (simply click the CC button at the bottom to see the auto-generated captions).

A video is worth 10,000 words so I am like…. why did we even take these pictures? But they are lively to look back on as things evolve. Someday we are going to be like “remember how we lived with a hole in the wall above the stove for a vent hood and after like a week our eyes did not even register it anymore?” Truly, I forget about that and the black dishwasher front that sticks out like a sore thumb until I see these photos and I am like… room for improvement. Anyway here is John for scale at the table. We have Enjoyed having a casual dining table in here instead of an island.

Since the chairs are standard height and not counter height we find ourselves sitting there to do all sorts of things that we did not tend to do as much at our last house’s kitchen island (write letters, sort paperwork, type on our laptop, etc). I am writing this post from that table right now!

One other large pro to not going with an island is that we all look into each others eyes when we eat! You know, as opposed to all sitting in a line and staring in the same direction instead of at each other. We enjoyed eating at the dining table in the beach house kitchen (and used the island there much less), so that was a good previous experience to base this choice on, and sure sufficient, we enjoy this setup here.

We debated all sorts of other ideas (adding a peninsula or a small island, building a banquette or adding bench seating along the wall, etc) but so far this is so pleasant and flexible and casual and straightforward that it is certainly our go-to solution for this space for the time being.

Oh and we have two more identical chairs upstairs in the office/art desk area that we can bring down in a pinch to seat six (watch the video for more on how we’d do that). We also have seating for 8 on our upstairs deck and will likely have yet another spot to eat outside on the front side porch which is covered, so entertaining options abound. You know when it is ok to have a bunch of people over your house again someday…

Behold, a closer shot the stove’s vent hole with these hookup wires hanging out. Memories in the making. The hilarious thing about this stove is that it works perfectly. We expected to have all sorts of weird issues with the old mismatched appliances in here (this house was empty for over four years and had some fairly extensive water damage and no heating/cooling at all in that time) yet all of the appliances are still going strong.

This is essentially the whole counter/cabinet area. A quite distinct story than the kitchen in our last house which had about 739 cabinets (only slightly exaggerating). But guess what? Everything we need fits. Stuff that we do not does not. Not a bad deal, right? We are also planning to add some shelves along that back wall with the sink on it, so that’ll free up even more storage space. Soon I hope!

Also, I feel the need to proclaim that I am in fact not hating the pink laminate counter. In fact I am QUITE tempted to make it work for our Phase 1 update (we are planning to paint the cabinets, get hidden hinges, some new hardware, add those shelves along the back wall, perhaps update the front panel of the dishwasher so it is white like the other appliances, etc).

I do have to figure out how to fix that missing pink corner of the counter, but perhaps some wood putty or Bondo that I can paint to match the rest of it will work…

Also if you did not watch the video yet, the short answer to the “will you lose the window in the photo above when you add a bathroom to the covered porch out there?” is: although that window is not especially bright since it is fully under a covered porch, after living here we enjoy the view, so we are thinking that we will add a smaller bathroom so we can keep half of the window and half of the view. One large lesson we have already learned here is that bigger is not better. A smaller bathroom will be simply fine. Honestly we have all been sharing simply one bathroom and it has been totally ok! Way less of an issue or adjustment than we thought! (You can hear more on that here – along with our future bathroom plans).

Oh and welcome to the pantry! That is right, watch the video to see it in action, because I know your brain is like: those drawers are too shallow to store anything! But we have big bags of chips, cereal, everything in there! It totally works simply like the drawers we had in the beach house kitchen. Oh and do you remember where these two big bookshelf cabinet things were in our last house? Everything in our new house = a lively game of what-was-where-in-the-Richmond-house. Here is a post that shows you the answer if you scroll down and look at the photos. And here is a post where you can see fairly much everything & where it used to be in our last house.

I feel like I keep saying “if you watched the video you saw…” because it truly gives you such a good sense of the space that photos cannot – but this room is so much more spacious than it seems (especially in the before pictures). About one third of the room is cabinets and counters and the fridge and then about two thirds of the space is the dining table, these two large bookcase/storage cabinets, and this little sitting area with a pleasant landing zone dresser full of storage by the door.

Here is the before shot from this angle, simply for lively.

Closing off the larger doorway in the photo below gave us a lot more usable wall space both in the kitchen/dining/sitting room and in our bedroom. That is the wall that our bed now rests against (you can see our glorious view from bed in this post).

Certainly helps to have that brought in wall space for a second bookshelf/cabinet thing in here. We also like that we can store dishes and plates and bowls up there. Sidenote: Plants enjoy Florida. Like I am learning this is a legitimate thing. Burger has never been happier. Also my plants.

You get a much better sense of this sitting area (say it with me!) IN THE VIDEO, but this is me attempting to show you in a picture which is consistently trickier. I plopped these chairs down with a little leather pouf between them fully expecting nobody to use them and then my plan was to be like “well the main family room with the big sofa and TV is upstairs so why do I need a second little sitting room down here?!” but EVERYONE USES THIS SPOT.

I am so glad I gave it a shot because it turns out that a little sitting area is so pleasant for the kids to do sticker books while we cook. Or hang out upside down in these chairs while talking to us or each other (that is a true phenomenon about these chairs – I have heard from other moms who are like “what is it about these that make children want to sit upside down in them?!”). Long story long: this little zone gets tons of use. I have in fact heard from a few people who have two chairs on one end of the kitchen for sitting and enjoying coffee with a newspaper or casual visits with a friend who might stop by and I gotta say – I can vouch for the concept. It is truly pleasant.

John and I sit in them too if one of us is working in the kitchen simply to chat or hang out. Since I am sure that is hard to picture, here is John watching Tiktok so you can see an adult in that area for scale. I believe this video had a cat pretending to be a snake. John is more entertained than he looks…

If you walk in our front door (which is seen in the photo above) there is this large laundry closet to your left that we brought in where there once was a quite strange smaller double-sided closet that led into our daughter’s room (more on that here).

We brought in floating shelves in there and a pleasant big countertop for storage and folding so this closet WORKS SO HARD for us. We will have to do a post on how we built them soon because they are game-changers when it comes to how much we can store in there. There certainly is a lot to tell you in the how-we-contain-all-the-things-in-a-house-with-three-closets vein! We will cover it all I promise.

Oh and from this picture of John being a phone model you can also see all the space between our little sitting area and the dresser by the door which is SO SO ESSENTIAL in the storage and function game. It is a main walkway for us and there is plenty of space to pass through, but also plenty of room to stand in front of the dresser and pull something out, which we find ourselves doing like 32 times a day.

The dresser has everything from sunscreen to Burger’s leash and doggy bags and all the other small items that it is pleasant to be able to grab on the way out the door. It is in fact the old dresser from our bedroom but we changed the hardware to these plain pulls. Enjoy all the brass in this house (Exhibit B: my beloved hinges and doorknobs, Exhibit C: my go-to gold frames).

Oh and see that woven “side table” in the photo above? It is simply a basket I had on hand with a lazy susan I also had on hand balanced on top (it is in fact held in place with three bottles of nail polish that I shoved through the basket holes around the top edge to support it). This room is a true testament to working with what you have. The second “side table” on the other side is another basket we already had with a plain Ikea tray resting on top to make a tabletop.

So yeah, this room is nowhere near wrapped up, but things landed and they are working surprisingly well! And perhaps best of all, our old appliances are also working surprisingly well! No complaints here at all. Although I had two of those Ikea baskets that I could have used as matching basket “tabletops” but I downsized one right before we moved. Ha! So you can file that under the one thing I in fact missed after I got rid of it.

P.S. To see the evolution of this house you can click this category for simply six posts that cover everything from the before tour and the progress updates to our exterior makeover and more.

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