Retro Inspired Play Kitchen

Ok, this post has been a long time in the making!  (And, uh, so has the project. :))

Yesterday, I finally was able to give Ezekiel his new play kitchen!  My dad and I started on it back in September/October and finished it in early December.  It sat for almost a month in my garage and I had the hardest time leaving it there and not pulling it out to play with.  :)

Early fall, I knew I wanted to make Zeek a play kitchen after seeing some really cool re-do's like here and here.  Then I found this really cool retro inspired play kitchen on Amazon.com:

Source: amazon.com via Kayla on Pinterest

I told my dad about this project and asked if he'd keep an eye out for the perfect cabinet.  I showed him the retro kitchen and told him this one was my favorite.  :)

Then a couple weeks later, he called me up to say he found it.  It wasn't pretty.  At all.  When I saw it, it took a lot of imagination to see the retro kitchen... but I saw it.  :)

Here's the (ugly) before:

It was pretty rough around the edges.  The two cabinet doors were removed before I was able to snap a photo.  Something I've mentioned before - when my dad gets excited about it a project, it's only a few minutes before it's already being demolished and turned into something new.

I took a ton of photo's of this cabinet to show you guys all the details.  I'll post a separate post to talk about all of the details and how we did it.  :)  (Or this would be an extremely long post!)

So, now that you've seen the before (and the inspiration!), here are the after's!

Storage cabinet under the sink.

Fridge and freezer!

I am in love with how the microwave turned out!

And I even made some play food.  :)  (I plan to keep making more as I find the right pieces in thrift stores/garage sales.)

You can see the detail's and "how-to" here. 
Also... my dad made a super cool shopping cart out of wine staves to go along with the kitchen!

And once more for "dramatic effect"... before and after:

This boy LOVES his new kitchen set.  He played with it for hours yesterday with his cousins (even his 9 year old cousin loved playing with it!) and woke up 2 hours early today to play with it again.  :)  I'm thinking this will be an awesome distraction for him when the new baby is here in the next couple weeks!

Hope you all had an awesome Christmas too.

Love,
K