Play Kitchen Redo

I recently bought a new to us play kitchen for my daughter at a consignment store.  It was in decent shape and for a decent price. I had been checking out prices for new play kitchens online and I was a little shocked but not surprised I guess to discover that they could easily hit $200. That’s too much for me for a toy that I’m not convinced my daughter will play with for the next four years. 😉 But I will give it a whirl for a more moderate price.

I was pleased with my purchase. It was painless…I walked into a consignment store for kids for the first time in this city and was delighted at the number of great items there. (Much better selection than I had seen in NOLA…gotta love the big families in the midwest) I made myself only buy the play kitchen. I brought it home and put it in the only place I could. My family room/toy room/sewing room is pretty tiny. So there’s no avoiding looking at this kitchen.

After a few days I decided that if this kitchen was going to reside in the same room as my lovely fabric and be seen all of the time, I needed to make it more “attractive”. I swear that I wanted to make it as cute as possible for the little girlie.

The stickers were painfully faded and slightly ridiculous to begin with. So I used some goo remover and took off a bunch of the less than sightly stickers. It was already looking better. But I decided that there definitely needed to be some fabric added. And I discovered after looking through my stash that I had a piece of AMH’s Innocent Crush line that matches PERFECTLY. I swear she must have designed the fabric after seeing this exact play kitchen. The colors are sooo perfect!

I whipped up some curtains for the open storage which I applied using velcro sewn to the curtains and stuck on the inner lip of the opening. But I’m very proud of the modge podge I applied to the top of the kitchen and microwave. And I found that some Japanese Washi tape that I just bought also matched perfectly and looked like little kitchen tiles. This kitchen has never looked so good!

I also removed a sticker from the “refrigerator” and replaced it with a fussy cut piece of Munki Munki fabric…still with the beverage theme.

There is a little phone and “recipe” book area in the center that I gave a lot of attention to. Stickers were removed and fun fabrics replaced them. Once again, some Heather Ross Munki Munki made an appearance on the phone. They also found their way onto the recipe book with some sushi. And other great food prints made their way into the recipe book.

I’ll admit that there were a number of hours put into this kitchen, but I don’t think you can buy a kitchen like this one (and don’t tell me if you can! lol). Now the little kitchen fits perfectly with the room with its lovely fabric AND bonus! It is helping block Caitlyn from getting to one of my fabric shelves. Oh, and I’m now having to refrain from going overboard on modge podge. But it’s a great way to add fabric to a project and I think I’ll be doing it again in the future.

Now I just need to start making some of that felt food!

She’s totally worth it.