I finally finished my exams last week and now I’m on Christmas break until January 10th! In Spain we celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, New Year’s, and the Three Wise Men (although we call them “kings”) who also come bearing gifts the night of January 5th… so we usually have breaks from school until the 7th or so. This year though, since the 7th is Friday, we don’t start until Monday 10th, yay! Also, I’m taking a 4h photography lesson the 7th, so it’s a good thing I don’t have to go to class or anything.

I spent Christmas with my dad’s side of the family in Madrid, but before I left we did some more things around the kitchen. The first was to close the gap between the freezer and the counter, (you can see the gap in the corner of a picture from a previous post). You see, the kitchen that came with the apartment had a couple of empty spots, one for the dishwasher and another one for the washing machine. It’s quite common to have the washing machine in the kitchen here (and no dryer – we use a clothes line to air dry clothes) but I’ve never really liked it. So we opted to use that space for the freezer, and the other one for the dishwasher as expected. The problem was that the kitchen counters were a “new” height, a bit taller than normal. Although this height is more comfortable, the appliances are still shorter and you’re stuck with an unsightly gap. That’s why we bought something similar to what bridged the gap between the oven and the counter.

The other thing we wanted to do, since the gap between the dishwasher was (barely) big enough for a drawer, was to – obviously – add a (third!) drawer to our kitchen. Like last time, I asked for a quote so the drawer would match the rest of the kitchen, but again, they quoted me something ridiculous: 50€ for the drawer front (we bought the structure itself at Ikea, like this time) and 22€ for the handle. Yeah right. After thinking it through, we came up with the idea of using the same thing we had used for the freezer to bridge the gap, so no one with think you had a drawer there. If I may say so myself, I think it worked out pretty well:

And it was much cheaper, about 7-8€ (plus the 20€ drawer itself from Ikea, which we would’ve bought anyway).

The last thing we did was add a soap dosifier onto the counter itself. I really like how it looks and it’s much more comfortable than the ceramic one we  used to have.

After organizing most of the cupboards today, we only have a couple of things left to do in the kitchen. The first one is organize the under the sink cleaning supplies, with the help of some Ikea accessories, of course. Then, finally, we will build a couple of barstools based on the amazing plans from Ana White. We’re still trying to decide between these modern ones and these simpler ones, which one do you like best?

Oh and I’d like to say that I got a couple of the things in my list for Christmas… one of the Zara Home frames and the digital weight scale, which I already used yesterday to bake something for dessert!

What do you think? Share your opinion in the comments.