We Did Not Build a Pinterest Kitchen. We Built a Working Homestead Kitchen. 🔪

When most people picture their dream kitchen, they probably think about beautiful countertops, matching cabinets and a space that always looks clean.

When I pictured mine, I thought about bushels of vegetables, stacks of canning jars, giant pots, muddy produce and enough refrigerator space to keep food from going bad before I could get to it.

Fourteen Years in the Making

When we bought our 300 year old house, we already knew rebuilding it would eventually become part of our story.

We had plans for the house from the beginning, but plans do not always happen quickly when you are also raising a family, homeschooling children, caring for animals, growing food and running a farm business.

It took us about fourteen years to finally rebuild the house and create the kitchen we had imagined.

By then, we had also spent fourteen years learning what we truly needed from a homestead kitchen. We were no longer designing it around guesses or appearances. We were designing it around years of real experience.

When a Regular Kitchen Is No Longer Enough

A regular household kitchen works perfectly well for regular household cooking.

Homestead cooking is a little different.

During harvest season, the counters quickly disappear beneath tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash, potatoes and baskets brought in from the garden. The sink fills up before you finish washing the first batch. Canning jars seem to multiply overnight, and there is usually a pressure canner or water bath canner taking over the stove.

Then there are all the ordinary family meals that still need to be made in the middle of it.

The kitchen becomes the place where everything meets. It is where the garden is washed, sorted, prepared, preserved and finally turned into food for the family.

After years of working around a kitchen that was never designed for that amount of food, I knew I needed a space that made the work easier.

The 48 Inch KOHLER Workstation Sink

The centerpiece of the kitchen is our 48 inch KOHLER workstation sink.

It is large enough to handle the kind of jobs that never fit comfortably in an ordinary kitchen sink. I can wash large batches of produce, clean oversized pots and spread the work out without everything being piled on top of everything else.

The workstation design also gives me room to prepare food directly over the sink. That means less mess on the counters and a more practical flow from washing to cutting and preparing.

We decided to install two faucets at the sink, and that has been one of the most useful choices we made. Two people can work at the sink at the same time, or one faucet can be used for rinsing while the other is filling a pot or handling another job.

We especially love having a sink this large when we process our chickens. There is enough room to work without trying to squeeze everything into a standard household sink. Once the work is finished, the large stainless steel basin is easy to thoroughly wash and sanitize.

The sink sits beneath a large window, so the entire work area receives plenty of natural light. Between the size of the basin, the workstation design and the two faucets, it was built for the kind of work we actually do here.

The Commercial Refrigerator That Changed Everything

One of the best things we ever purchased for the homestead was our commercial two door refrigerator.

It might sound excessive until you have several baskets of produce coming in at the same time, gallons of milk that need to stay cold and food waiting to be processed or preserved.

A normal refrigerator fills up very quickly on a working farm. We would have needed multiple household refrigerators to hold everything that regularly comes through this kitchen.

For us, running one commercial refrigerator made much more sense than running several separate household refrigerators. It gives us the storage we need without having multiple units taking up space and using electricity.

You also do not need to spend $22,000 on one of the fancy commercial refrigerators you might see in a high end showroom. Ours is a basic commercial refrigerator like the kind commonly used in restaurants. It does the job we need it to do without all the expensive extras.

The commercial refrigerator gives us room to organize everything and buy ourselves something that is always in short supply during harvest season: time.

Not everything can be canned, frozen or prepared the minute it comes through the door. Sometimes produce has to wait while animals are fed, customers are helped, meals are made or another batch is already in the canner.

The extra refrigerator space helps keep that food fresh until I can get to it.

Even with two doors, it still manages to feel full during the busiest weeks of the season. That is simply the reality of growing and preserving a large amount of your own food.

Designed Around the Work We Actually Do

I think there is a difference between designing a kitchen around how you want it to look and designing one around how you actually live.

This kitchen was created for our real life.

It was designed for vegetables covered in garden soil. It was designed for jars, large pots, cutting boards, chicken processing and long days spent preserving food. It was designed for a family that still needs dinner while the entire harvest seems to arrive at once.

The wide counters give us space to spread out. The large sink makes washing and preparation more manageable. The two faucets allow more than one job to happen at once. The commercial refrigerator holds what we cannot process immediately.

Everything has a purpose.

That does not mean the kitchen always looks like the finished photographs. Most days, there will be something soaking in the sink, jars sitting on the counter or a basket of produce waiting for its turn.

That is exactly what the kitchen was built for.

A Working Kitchen Will Never Stay Perfect

There is a lot of pressure online to make homestead life look calm and beautiful.

Sometimes it is beautiful.

Other times, there are tomatoes getting too ripe, dishes piled beside the sink and more food waiting to be preserved than there are hours left in the day.

A working homestead kitchen is going to get dirty. The sink will be full. The counters will be used. There will be water splashed around and vegetables waiting in places where decorations might otherwise go.

Building for the Life We Chose

This kitchen did not make the work disappear. There are still vegetables to wash, meals to prepare, chickens to process and jars to fill.

What it did was give that work a place to happen.

The workstation sink and commercial refrigerator are not luxuries on our homestead. They are tools, just like the canner, the garden equipment and everything else we use to produce and preserve food.

After more than fourteen years of homesteading and rebuilding this old house, I have learned that the best improvements are not always the prettiest or most impressive ones.

They are the ones that remove one more obstacle from the work you do every day.

This kitchen is still beautiful to me, but not because it always looks perfect.

It is beautiful because it was built for the life we actually live.