It was a gloomy, overcast November day when we knew officially that Mike would be moving back to Connecticut from his year spent working and living in the suburbs of Boston. At that point I had already scoped out several potential apartments for us to look at together, and we hopped right to it. We hated them all. Then one day, scouring Craigslist, I happened upon a floor plan for an apartment that I fell absolutely in love with. I called the complex that day, spoke with the leasing manager, and the next day I met her on my lunch break to see a unit. The unit I saw was in the process of being flipped after its previous tenant had recently vacated. It was utterly disgusting. But I could see the potential there, so much potential, so I got the ball rolling on signing the lease that very day. We signed the lease for that unit without Mike ever having set foot in it.

I picked up the keys the day before Thanksgiving 2017. When Mike finally got to see our new home, thankfully he saw that same thing I did! For what it was – a cheap place to live exactly halfway in between our jobs and close to any amenity we could ever want or need in a nice historical part of town – it was a great find! We spent the weekend eating leftovers (the best part of Thanksgiving, naturally), moving my belongings a few towns over, and moving Mike’s belongings a whole state over. We were comfortably moved in in no time, and I was so happy every day to be living with Mike after two and a half years of dating.

As you may imagine, with Mike living in Boston the entire year prior, I had a lot of time on my hands. I started cooking a lot that year, in my mother’s kitchen in my childhood home that I had lived in for my entire life. It was mostly meal prep cooking so that I had healthy food to eat all week long, but it was cooking nonetheless. I learned a lot and I started to really enjoy to cook that year. I come from a family of fantastic cooks, my mother now and my grandmother before her, so spending a lot of time in the kitchen just kind of came naturally to me. But it never felt like my space. I felt like a bit of an intruder in my own home. My mom and I were constantly bickering over fridge space, pans used, kitchen cleanliness.

When Mike and I moved into our apartment, all of that changed immediately. There was an unspoken agreement that the kitchen was simply my domain. He would go in there to feed himself peanut butter out of the (giant) jar by the spoonful, make himself a cup of instant coffee, get himself a beer out of the fridge. That kitchen in that apartment is where I spent 90% of my time when I was at home. At times, Mike jokingly barred entry to the kitchen with our dining chairs just so that I would take a seat on the couch for a few minutes. When we moved in my creative juices began to flow and they haven’t let up since. I cooked countless recipes from cookbooks and bloggers. It wasn’t long before I was creating my own.

Despite all of what I’ve just told you about my now-obvious love for this kitchen, it really and truly left a lot to be desired. Everything in it had a dingy yellow tinge to it. The linoleum was so obviously original to the unit when it was first built in the 1980’s. Everything was peeling just a little bit, just enough that the property managers didn’t see it as necessary to fix in that brief moment of time after the last tenants had moved out and before the next ones laboriously moved their lives in. Many of the lower cabinets had shoddy hardware in them. Instead of fixing the shelves that would constantly collapse, one day I got smart and simply used pans and cast iron cookware as tools to hold my shelves up. They never collapsed again, and it just so happened that I never used those pans anyway. It felt good to finally assign to them a noble task.

For all its faults, I loved this kitchen endlessly. I’m fairly confident the oven and refrigerator were original to the unit, meaning they’re currently around 40 years old. The dishwasher couldn’t have been much newer than that, if at all. What I mean to say is, these appliances were horrendously ugly. But you know what? They worked. And they worked incredibly well. That oven would preheat in five minutes flat, versus the ~20 it now takes the oven in my condo. The refrigerator was enormous and had ample storage in all the right configurations for our needs. We joked that when we moved out we were going to take the appliances with us, since it’s a well known fact now that newer appliances just aren’t built like they used to be. I feel like a geriatric typing that out, but we all know it’s true. We experienced that first hand when just two months after closing on our new home we had to replace the dishwasher. But four years in our apartment our 30+ year old workhorse of a dishwasher took a beating day in and day out. When a part fell out of that dishwasher, we went to the dollar store, found a rubber spatula, cut it to the right length, and shoved that rubber piece into the dishwasher and it was never a problem again.

That utilitarian kitchen was magical. It’s where we conversated and taste tested and experimented with food. We laughed and we danced and we loved and it’s where my food blog was born. Our last day there, Thanksgiving weekend yet again, we were really just there to clean one last time and make sure we had everything. We made one last trip inside and we walked around and I cried. I cried a lot. I’m crying again thinking about it and putting my feelings for this place into words. So many happy memories were made there, in that apartment, and in that ugly kitchen especially. I am so thankful that I had the foresight to document our first home together, to take as many photographs as I did. And to write about it all here, even if it doesn’t really fit the current “theme” on my food blog and I’m completely unsure of how this will resonate with anyone who reads it.

But then I got to thinking. I can’t be the only person out there to feel this way. I’m sure I’m not the only person who had a kitchen that left a lot to be aesthetically desired in one of the places I’ve inhabited. But does it matter what it looks like? It’s yours. It’s finally gloriously yours to do what you want in it, make what you want, nothing but cake for a week straight if you want it. If you’re reading this as you’re hating your own kitchen for whatever reason (it’s January so maybe you’ve spent more time in there in the last month than you normally would), take a step back for a moment. See it for what it is. See it for what it gives to you each and every day. It’s what nourishes your body (maybe just forget about my cake comment from a couple sentences ago for the time being) and your mind. And at the end of the day, something that gives us so much while asking for so little in return is something to be celebrated indeed.

Have an ugly kitchen of your very own, or have you at another stage in your life? I’d love it if you told me all about it in the comments below!