If Carlsberg Made Play Kitchens

For Eva's second birthday present, we gave her a play kitchen. I'd been stalking play kitchens on eBay for months, only to get sniped at the last minute with the price soaring way higher than the cost of the Ikea kitchen (our benchmark for good toddler kitchen-age).

So we decided to make our own.

Naturally, we built it with random items lying around in the cellar, starting with this 4 x 2 wooden unit.

We cut it down to 3 x 2, installed an extra shelf, added a wooden worktop, built an upper shelving unit, and primed the whole thing.

After painting everything, we added doors (with proper cabinet hinges), handles, a tap (also found in the cellar), a basin (made from a dog bowl!), utensil hooks, a perspex pane for the oven door, and a cooker rings made from MDF spray-painted silver.

Check out the majestic awesomeness:

Best. Play. Kitchen. Ever.

Eva loves it. She absolutely loves it. And sheactually plays with it independently for up to an hour! It's the holy grail of toddler parenting, people. It was also a huge hit at her birthday party (we got it finished just in the nick of time - in fact we still need to add the cooker knobs).

Two-year olds aren't the only ones who find the kitchen to be of interest:

What's cooking, big dawg?

Thanks to the cellar of bountifulness we didn't need to buy any wood or paint, so the play kitchen ended up costing around £30 for hinges, handles, basin, wire rack for oven, perspex panel for oven door, and hooks for utensils.

And yes. We know. Our carpets are HIDEOUS.