$14 Play Kitchen

Christmas time is somewhat stressful for everyone. The lack of time, money, patience and pizza is alarming. This year I wanted something big for each of my sweet kiddos - the youngest of which is a culinary mastermind who needed his own play kitchen. Since everything in the market was either very expensive or pink and plastic, I took matters into my own hand.

This started out as a very old cabinet with a drawer. My mother had already refinished it 20 years ago and it was again no longer being used.

The first thing I had to do was find a "sink" after searching home stores I realized porcelain or metal were just too fragile and resorted to PartyCity where they had these hard plastic chip bowls for $1.99. Initially I had imagined a circle but hey, this was cool too. And the hard plastic is exceptionally durable.

I drew around it with a pencil and then cut about 1/2 inch inside of that line so the sink would have a lip to keep it in place.

Dabbed around it with some strong adhesive glue and let it sit.

The rest was just paint! I took off all the doors and hardware and used an oil based white for the top. I used white because that's what we had leftover from another project. I painted one door all silver to give the illusion of a refrigerator door and changed the handle (.99 from rummage sale and .99 acrylic paint from Hobby Lobby). Same for the red (acrylic .99 paint). I used the same silver paint on the hardware and put the doors back on.

I did have to cut out part of the back of the drawer so the bottom of the sink could slide back and forth.

Because the drawer had two raised panels, I used the silver to make one look like a little oven. Black rectangle of construction paper and a picture of muffins cut out of a cook book glued on complete the effect. (Handle we already had but those are about $3 at the store for one)

The top i painted a rectangle in the same silver and then used black acrylic paint to make circles (.99 Hobby Lobby). Once dried, I used some of the red paint and some of the silver paint to make swirls for each burner. We happened to have glitter glue in our craft area to add to it but it isn't necessary.

Then I took wooden handles (.59 for 4 smaller ones and .99 for the two large ones) and painted them black with grey tick marks for the burner handles. Painted one red for the hot and used blue marker on the other for the cold. Screwed them in and voila.

On the full red door I had to put something in the middle to break it up since there was no way of making the previously decoupaged pear invisible so I put in a little hand-painted sign.

The faucet is two pieces of PVC pipe glued together - one inserted from the inside which has a thicker base so it won't come through (it took 15  minutes before the child was trying to take the faucet off ). Each pipe piece was $2

And here it is for Christmas morning:

I think Santa did pretty good :)