We've gotten a few questions recently about cooking in our tiny house kitchen. Actually, the questions are more about whether there's room for kitchen sundries and dishes and silverware, etc. than actual cooking.

I'm happy to say that we have more than enough room for every pot and pan, every dish, every can and cereal box we want. After two years of full-time living in the house, we continue to shed things we don't use—not because we don't have space, but because living is easier when the excess get cleared out.

Below are some of our kitchen storage solutions. We'd love you to add questions/comments below to keep the conversation going.

Our pantry, with full pull-out drawers holds all our non-perishable food, our dishes, our biggest pot, water bottles, and even cleaning supplies. It's part of the wall that separates the bathroom from the kitchen and living area.

Four deep drawers hold silverware, utensils, dish towels and napkins, storage containers, pot lids, cutting boards and serving pieces. Ours, from IKEA, pull out all the way and close softly. The drawer with silverware has an inner drawer to make use of the full height of the drawer.

The counter behind the oven isn't attached. We can lift it to reach a space where we have room to store big items like the pizza stone and peel, baking pans and the countertop sections that cover the sink.

We have a giant sink in the tiny house, and it's a great place to store drying dishes (or dirty dishes!). We cut our butcher block countertop carefully when it was time to install the kitchen, then drilled a hole in the center and sliced the cutout in two. When we need more counter space, we pull out one or both of the inserts and hide away anything we don't want out.

The sink is big, but there's still enough room under the sink to house a point-of-use water heater, a dish towel and cleaning rag, plus  two bins—one for trash, the other for recycling. (The handy bins, complete with fold-down handles, are another IKEA find.)

Open shelves make accessing glasses, the coffee press, and bowls a cinch. (Anything that doesn't look good on an open shelf finds its home in one of the pantry drawers.) A 10-foot-long shelf running between the windows and the ceiling holds china we don't need every day (plus some pretty heirloom silver). We have a step ladder that slides under the kitchen table to access the top shelf.

We make up for any square-footage deficit by maximizing vertical space. Our knives, spices, most-used pots and pans, wooden spoons, water filter and more hang on the wall. Once again, IKEA was both inspiration and supplier for much of this hardware.

​Our refrigerator is big enough to hold all the perishable food we need for a party and/or a week's worth of meals. We went with an Energy Star, space-saving, under-the-counter model from GE that offered the most bang for the buck. What we don't have in our kitchen: a freezer. But that was a strategic decision. Our friend, on whose land we live, already had an under-used freezer in her basement. It takes just a minute or two to walk over and pick up something from her freezer. 

I've written a few blogs about "using every inch." That's nowhere more important than the kitchen. When I realized I had an extra six inches between the refrigerator and where I planned to put the kitchen table, I tried to think of the best way to use the space; a glass of wine helped the thinking. Voila! A wine rack, made from one of my favorite materials: a shipping pallet.

When the subject of our tiny house comes up with people we've just met, two questions pop up more than others: Does your composting toilet smell? Do you have to climb a ladder to get to your bed? The answer to both: No.

We've waxed on about our kitchen and answered the toilet question in past blogs, but we haven't said much about our amazing ground-floor (!) bedroom.  Things are just about where we want them now, with the big exception of installing our wood stove—and, with winter around the corner, we're getting on that.

The bedroom has a compact 11x8' footprint. All our clothes, shoes, backpacks, accessories, jewelry, scarves, and hats, plus books, photos, art and more share the space with our bed. That's possible thanks to a big IKEA wardrobe, an IKEA bed frame with built-in drawers, two above-window shelves and our newly crafted shoe shelf. 

We had planned on building the bed platform and closet ourselves and just went to IKEA for ideas. But when we saw they had solutions that fit our needs almost exactly that cost the same or less than our DIY approach, and they could be up and running in a day (instead of weeks!), we broke out the credit card and brought home the IKEA pieces. The Brimnes bed frame has two massive, slide-out drawers on each side that hold all our jeans, T-shirts, sweaters—and more. The Pax wardrobe fits all our hung clothes; plus, it has three drawers for our socks, etc, a slide-out shelf for a few shoes and a shelf with plenty of room for our "charging station." (Via a small hole cut through the side of the wardrobe, we plug all our phone and computer chargers into a four-plug outlet we installed with just this in mind.)

We went with all black wood in the bedroom, to give the space its own look and feel. The white walls make a great gallery space. A little less lovely to look at—but extremely useful—is a wall of hooks for jackets, backpacks, etc.

​Please click on the pictures below for more details.