Our New Play Kitchen

If you are my mom or my husband, you have heard me complaining at length about the space our play kitchen takes up, relative to the play it receives.  Play kitchen = big, amount of play = little.  I have been trying to get rid of the darn thing since shortly after we got here.  I even put it in the basement for several months, but the kiddos wanted it back badly enough that we negotiated a trade...give away some toys and you can get it back.  Still...very little play.  So we got some new kitchen stuff and new play food for Christmas.  Still...very little play.

So today I pointed out some cracks in the plastic and the girls and I decided we should make a new one since our old one was "falling apart".  There are so many wonderful play kitchens out there, but we have such limited space that this is what we came up with.

We harvested the faucet and burner knobs off of the old kitchen.  In the lid of the tote where we store our kitchen stuff I cut a hole and we put in one of their bowls to serve as a sink.  I'd like to find a slightly bigger one, but this suffices for the time being.  We hot glued the old faucet onto the lid and poked little holes to put the burner knobs in so they still turn (Stacy is turning them for you in this picture!).  The burners are cut from some red corrugated plastic that was formerly shelves in the old kitchen.  So now the kitchen and the toys are all in one spot...I love it already!

The girls had fun making it with me, and played with it until we were ready for lunch.  That's more play than the old one has gotten in the last 3 months!  And the best part...it cost us $0!