for a while now i have been wanting to buy an old stove. not for decoration. to use. as my stove. in my house. when we bought our house, we were ok with the stove in the kitchen for now...
...but we knew that we would eventually want to replace it. initially we were thinking of buying all new, stainless steel, blah blah blah, and we did buy a new stainless fridge that i love. but the more i think about my design style and how i want to live (simply, trying not to acquire so many possessions, and trying to buy used/vintage/salvaged as much as possible) i started to think that an old stove is what i should do instead of buying new. there are always lots of old stoves on craigslist, like this one...
...but being the worrier that i am i think about how i will know if it's useable or not, how will it fit it into my TINY kitchen, etc.
here's some examples of the same stove in other kitchens and i think it LOOKS great (both pictures are from sneak peeks on design sponge).
now, look at that very first picture of my kitchen and try to imagine how we might make it work. i think we would have to take out one section of the lower cabinets to the right or left of the stove to fit the slightly larger older stove and then build a narrow section of cabinets to fill in the remaining space. we are most likely going to replace the counter tops someday anyway, because we HATE them, but we were planning on doing these types of projects gradually instead of all at once to spread out the cost over time. so, if we decide to buy the stove from above from craigslist this kind of bumps up all of these projects to the more immediate future. this ultimately brings up bigger home project dilemmas for me. those of you who do DIY or reno projects understand: how far should we go with this reno? how much money should we invest in changing what we have? should i take some risks to go with what i love or just stick with what i have? are we going to stay in this house for a long enough time to make it worth it?
so my questions to you are: what would you do? what do you think of using an old stove instead of using modern appliances? do you have creative solutions for fitting it into my tiny space? should i go for it or play it safe?
2 comments:
I think the old stove looks killer. It fits with your personality and the look you want for your house.
My concerns would fall along the lines of safety and usability.
Is all the old wiring reliable? AKA, will it burn down your house?
Also, does the thermostat still work? I had an oven once that could be set for 350 and be anywhere from 150-475 at any given moment. Makes it REALLY hard to bake anything. Even frozen pizzas don't thrive in that environment.
As for the costs involved... If you can do it without debt; go for it. If you have to use credit, start saving and be patient. (I'm taking a Dave Ramsey class right now, and I blame everything I want to do but can't afford on him now. AKA, "Dave says....")
I really like how it looks too! So fun! I probably would only do it if I knew for sure it would work. I don't know how to go about finding that out. :) If you were certain that is what you wanted to do, you could go ahead and buy it and hold on to it until you felt you could afford the cabinet work. I know my tendency is to want to just do something right away when I'm excited about it. But Nate usually tells me that if we don't need it right now it just makes sense to wait. Not the most fun, but he's right. I totally love your idea!
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