My Cottage Kitchen Tour, YOUR questions: Where's my stove hood? What's that wallpaper? And MORE!

Hello, my friends, and welcome to my almost finished kitchen. It's been ages since we've done a kitchen tour. I've been promising that it's going to come for the longest time, and finally, it's here. Part of the problem with doing a video like this is it needs to be clean. So no, my kitchen doesn't always look like this. If yours is a complete wreck right now, you're usually in good company. This is hours of cleaning to make it look this sparkly and this beautiful just for you because no one needs to see those dirty dishes. Although if you want to follow us over on Instagram, there are certainly pictures of dirty dishes in my stories over there. I'm going to try and go through the kitchen, sweep through and answer all these questions that y'all have been having for me over the last couple of years. This kitchen story starts over 100 years ago when this house was first built. We know it was registered in 1909. We don't really know when the house was built, but we do know that this kitchen was part of the original house, and we know that because of the walls and the lumber that was used. A huge thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring today's video. If you can drag and drop pictures and you know how to save a file, then you can build your next creative website with Squarespace. They've got ready-to-use templates that you can choose from and simply customize with whatever you like. This is exactly what we did when we launched Homemaker Chic Podcast last year, and we needed an easy way to link to social media pages and more. So whether you have a podcast, a nonprofit, an online community, or are looking for a way to easily sell your products, look no further than Squarespace. Get your new creative adventure started with a free trial and 10% off your purchase by visiting squarespace.com forward slash Elliot Homestead. Now, when we moved into this house, I'm going to make sure we stick in some before pictures here so you can see what we walked into. The house as a whole was very 60s, 1960s. It hadn't been addressed in a long time, and so part of what we had to do in this kitchen is really just strip back layers and layers and layers, sort of bringing it back to its former glory. Now, lest you think, oh, it must be nice to just have a beautiful kitchen. We started this renovation six years ago, and we're just now getting to the point where, I mean, it's like the tiniest details that are left. So this has been a very long journey getting to this point. As you can see from those photos, we had to take a lot of stuff out of the kitchen. So one of the first things that we did was take out all those faux oak cupboards. I actually don't even know what they were. They were really well built, but they were not what we wanted in this space at all. What we did next was put up open shelving, which turns out didn't work for us either because I'm not very tall, and I found it really cumbersome to try to reach up on the shelves to get down stuff. So the kitchen, as many of you commented when I asked what you wanted to know about the kitchen, you said, man, it's gone through a lot of different sort of layouts and transitions. Yeah, it has. To get to this point, which looks really simple, took us a lot of failing. Open shelving was definitely one of those things for me. So what we did instead was actually convert this old ice box into our dish holder. Let me show you. So this we picked up for a couple hundred dollars at an antique store. It was an old fridge unit, and instead we use it to store all of our dishes. So big plates, little plates, cups and bowls, and mugs. This works really well for us. I keep extras out in the dining room, but this makes it really easy for the kids to put dishes away from the dishwasher. And it holds our espresso machine. You guys may notice this is a new espresso machine, new to us anyway. It's a really old Craigslist find from an old coffee shop that we adapted to work in our home because our last espresso machine took up so much space in the kitchen. It had two big working heads that we really didn't need because it's just Stu and I drinking coffee for the most part. So this is a Fama espresso machine. I think it's maybe from the early 90s. Anyway, Craigslist find works great. The top heats up, so it keeps your mugs nice and warm. And then we move on. Yes, we are still roasting our own coffee. This is the little canister made by a local winemaker who also does pottery. We have our little hand grinder here, which is a little bit of labor, but doesn't break. And then I keep just a little bin of rags here. And then, of course, right next to me is the stairway down to the root cellar, but that is another video. So moving through the kitchen here, you'll notice that this looks a lot different than it used to. The reason for that is we took off plaster, and what we discovered behind it was a built-in cupboard. Imagine that, full of beer bottles and whiskey bottles. And we decided, of course, we're going to keep this instead of covering up. So this now is where I house kind of the things that I want to keep on hand all the time when I'm in the kitchen. Okay, so here is what I deem valuable enough to be upstairs in the kitchen rather than downstairs in the root cellar. Up top, you can see I have a couple copper double boilers, my big copper stockpot, and my grain grinder. Those are things I use often enough that they deserve to live in the kitchen. And then, of course, moving down, I just have some baking supplies like cornmeal, polenta, dates, einkorn wheat berries, that's salt, my kombucha scoby, and then I keep my cooking community recipes on hand because these are kind of the recipe books I use the most. So I keep them here. This is a little bit more of a baking shelf. We have granola for the kids, sugar, coffee beans that we roast, and then my spices and baking goods, like baking powder and cornstarch and those kinds of things where I can really easily accessible get to them. And then down here, I keep my flours because this is kind of my bread baking station. And then I have just this old basket of sort of chips and breads or buns or things that we have like that that aren't very pretty to look at and sort of need a place to be contained. Then, of course, my kitchen scale, paper towels for emergencies, and a box cheese grater. So this is all stuff that gets to live out here. And the big canister here is where I keep my all-purpose einkorn flour. This is the flour I use more than any other flour. This canister has lived on my countertop for basically as long as I've been in this kitchen. And then really the only appliance that gets to live out on the countertop is my KitchenAid mixer. So the three appliances that I use the most are the Vitamix blender, the Cuisinart food processor, and then the KitchenAid mixer. The first two I keep down in the root cellar, mainly because they're not that heavy. And so if I want to use them, I can bring them up pretty easily. The KitchenAid mixer.