My tiny Kitchen: Guest Post

After sharing my blog post about my kitchen renovation, one of my dear readers contacted me with a lovely response.  Her name is Talita Keller.  Several months ago she found my blog and started sending me special letters through the email and we became close friends who live far apart.  

She is a missionary to Asia.  I have several sweet friends from all around the world.  One from France, a friend from Australia, and Asia.  They are faithful friends, always writing me and sending things in the mail.  I appreciate them so much.  They brighten my day each time I think of how they took the time to think and pray for me and my entire family.  

Talita showed me her kitchen but more importantly, she showed me a little of her heart.  She has such a great perspective and I thought it would be an encouragement to pass along her wisdom to all of my other readers.  

Please send me your ideas, I would love to post once a week a glimpse into another woman’s home, the way they organize!  What fun!  

​Here is Talita’s lovely kitchen and her encouraging story of how she makes the most of her Tiny Kitchen space… 

The heart of my house is a very small heart. A small heart that needs to carry a heavy load of five people that it needs to feed. But it is a happy heart, because it has a capable lady with organizing skills, galore……

I was so happy when I came upon Erin’s blog. To organize and to keep my kitchen organized can be a tiring, constant, and a hard job. Her blog inspires me to keep going and to have a healthy standard. As I once told her, my kitchen is so small if all five of us just put our cups in the sink, it is full, and the kitchen is overcrowded.

The working space that you see in the photo is my entire kitchen working space. What is a miracle in itself is that I don’t get frustrated. If God is somehow putting me through a test of being grateful and thankful, I definitely am succeeding in this test, only by His amazing grace, of course!

I had many different kinds of kitchens in my life. I had kitchens that had so many cupboards there was space for more things than I even needed. I had a kitchen so big you could dance in it. I had a farm kitchen where I pulled an old dishwasher from the barn and used it as a dish cabinet, then I got my very tiny little kitchen. I also cooked for camps, so I am used to kitchens fully equipped, and yet kitchens so ill equipped that you had to use boxes as tables and had to cook in the open air (we love camping!).

The very first thing I do when I move into a new place is to organize my kitchen. It is after all the place that gets dirty very quickly and must be very hygienic. With this small little kitchen of mine I had to break it up in parts. In the kitchen alone is one of my refrigerators. Because it is a renting house, I got a cabinet on the balcony that I use for my dishes and plastic wear and microwave. I bought little plastic drawers and added to an opening in the cabinet. That serves for putting away my utensils.

In my living room, just outside the kitchen door, I made a station for the bread machine, knives, forks and so on and my son and I took an old box, covered it with a straw rag for storing odds and ends. 
In my dining area I have a lovely build in cupboard. I used some plastic rack dividers to create more storage place, I am still adding to the plastic racks as I have money for it. Little by little. This area I use as my storage for everything, from food, to camping chairs, gas, ironing board (the important part of this cupboard is that I don’t store things that are not sealed or can turn bad easily in there, because it is such a variety of things getting stored there.)  With this cupboard, I can close and it looks neat. The challenge of this cupboard is that it needs to stay organized. With three children in the house who must help with chores it can become very scrambled. So it took me a while to figure out a way to “READ” the cupboard. I must say that with “REWRITING”, a few “READING” lessons they all understand the “CHAPTER” and it is easy to see what goes where. 
On my balcony, just outside the kitchen doors, I have my other refrigerator, protected from the rain and next to it my tiny little oven with some space to put away detergents. Across from my outside refrigerator is my washing machine.
My motto in life is that if I don’t have room for it, it must go. We can accumulate so many things that it starts to suffocate us. I once listened to a story about a man that was found by missionaries on the street dying. All he owned his whole life was the rags he was wearing and five cents in the palm of his one clasped hand. That made me realize that what we have is already too much and sometimes we keep things we long ago have no need of. We hold so fast to stuff and we so easily buy new things. I love not to have too much money, because it puts my creative brain into action. It shows me what God already provided for me to discover how to use what we have been blessed with effectively.

For example, I needed another utensil jar. For a long time I had this ‘golden’ square flower pot standing around still with old dirt in it. I got tired of it, but did not want to throw it away. One day as I looked at it, still standing around and was inspired by Erin’s new Homestead creation, the idea came to me, use it as the needed utensil jar. So I have this lovely golden utensil jar. I will never replace it with a new one, because the discovery was just priceless.

Just yesterday I baked four pans of rusks, two pans of oatmeal cookies, one loaf of bread, two pans of hotdog buns and I cooked a tomato stew for dinner with rice. In my super small kitchen and in between my children had breakfast and lunch and drinks.

Your house is full of treasures. Use it wisely and if you don’t know how, expand your ideas of what should be where. My kitchen is in three sections and it works out beautifully. I could overcome the obstacle of space and I am still working on bettering it. I could teach my children how to keep things organized by creating a “READEBLE” environment. Ask God to help you to think about ways you need to organize things. It helps a lot not to get frustrated and despondent. If God could equip the Israelites to do things they could never do, how is it impossible for you, with God’s help, not being able to do whatever you want or need to do.

It is possible.

Through Christ everything is possible.

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13 thoughts on “My tiny Kitchen: Guest Post”

  1. Talita, a huge Hi from South Africa, love your storie! You are very organized, I seem to lack the ability to be organized! I try to though, but with 4 kids and a boer, not so easily done.

    1. Hi Shanelle. It is nice to hear from you out of sunny South Africa. We are approaching Winter here in Taiwan. I do miss Summer Christmases. God is good to us. We grow. We live. We learn to love more.
      May God bless you.

  2. Wow!!!! it was so nice to see your home and how organized it is. What an inspiration. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. Talita is always an inspiration for me as her younger sister. She will always look at things in a positive way and if you ask her how she is doing she will always replay :”It’s going great” She never complain about her circumstances. And always an spiritual answer to all our questions. I true woman of God. Thank you for sharing with us Erin! God bless you and your families.

  3. Very nice to meet you Talita and thank you for sharing your lovely tidy and organized home that is full of clever ways of storage. There is something very rewarding about having everything in it’s place. I live very differently from you as we have a 1400 acre sheep farm so there is a lot to look after but inside our home I have it organized and neat and clean. that is important not only for your health and happiness but as a lovely place to come into after working all day outside. thank you Erin for sharing this with us all xx your aussie mate vicki

  4. What an encouraging and practical post! I love what Talita said about how she likes NOT having much money – so that she is forced to be creative. God bless!

  5. Dearest Erin
    Thank you so much for this wonderful opportunity. I enjoyed doing this so much. I feel part of God’s family even as far as Tennessee. God bless you for your open heart.

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