This year for Christmas we decided to keep it simple and do the {Something You Want, Something You Need, Something to Wear & Something to Read}.
For the last few months Kensi has been asking where her kitchen is since playing with one at grandma and grandpas over the summer. She already has some play food and appliances, but we both feel she's ready and needs a kitchen. Plus her gentle reminders each day are also helpful, but also very informative as she explains why she in fact needs her very own kitchen.
We started looking for one we loved and of course it had to come from Pottery Barn and cost a freakin arm to buy. As much as I adore the farmhouse three piece kitchen from PBKids there's no way we could swing that this year. So the search continued and we got a phone call from my mom telling us about a one piece kitchen from Costco. It fit our budget, but I just couldn't handle all the color. It would literally drive me insane to look at it and yes I did consider painting it, but I wanted an easier project to work on. That's how we got to the IKEA Play Kitchen. It's adorable and simple. It just needed a little character. I looked to Pinterest for some inspiration and fell madly in love with SniderMoneyPit Blog’s white and gold kitchen makeover. No more looking was needed, this was a done deal.
I really thought this would be a challenge to work on with Kensi around all the time, but since we leave everything until the last minute we did all this the last few nights leading up to Christmas Eve.
We used spray paint for the sink, stove rim and feet; swapped out the handles for real hardware that we also sprayed and added some fun knobs for the stove. We used white spray paint for the body of the kitchen that wasn’t already white and finished the countertop by sanding it down and using leftover stain. Our gold spray paint began chipping and scratching almost immediately, so I would suggest priming those pieces like SniderMoneyPit did to save yourself the pain of having to do it again later.
We set the kitchen up next to the tree on Christmas Eve. I couldn’t handle the excitement of giving this to her. She slept great, I on the other hand could not sleep a wink! When Christmas morning finally came Mike was ready to go with the video camera and captured her reaction. I really thought she would be over the top and just freak out, but it was the complete opposite. Kensi and I came downstiars and checked out the empty plate of cookies, Kensi understood Santa must have come. When we walked over to our tree she calmly walked closer and said, “Oh! My kitchen!” She was very matter of fact, like this is what I wanted and now it’s here sorta thing. She was very excited and immediately started making coffee and cookies for us. Of course Little Miss Protective wouldn't let either one of us touch her kitchen the entire day...not even after we made an awesome Santa pancake....life with a 2 year old, sheesh!
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