Our Dirty Kitchen Is a Secondary Kitchen

Tagged with bar, fish, home appliances, kitchen, microwave oven on December 10, 2023

A dirty kitchen is not necessarily a kitchen that isn’t clean, although that type obviously exists. The dirty kitchen I’m referring to is a secondary kitchen, separate from the main kitchen. I’ve never heard of dirty kitchens being used in the United States, but I’m sure they exist even if they’re called something else.

Some people build their dirty kitchens away from their houses, and others build theirs adjoining their houses, like we did.

Our Dirty Kitchen

Some people build theirs with wood, except for the roofing. We built ours with most of the same materials as the rest of our house. It doesn’t make sense to use cheap materials. Two walls have cupboards and cabinets. The narrow wall also has a sink and a propane two-burner stove on the counter.

Our dirty kitchen is only about half of the extension we added to the back of our house. The original exit doors lead into either the laundry room or the dirty kitchen. Both rooms are bigger than any other room in the house except the master bedroom.

I don’t remember when we started building the extension, and I don’t remember when we finished it. It took a couple of years because of my fixed monthly budget. We started renovating it even later, when we replaced the wood cupboards with aluminum and pieces of Hardie Flex sheets, due to termite damage. Then we replaced the open windows with bug screens and jalousie windows to keep the flies and blowing rain out.

My wife, Josie, chose the colors for the dirty kitchen. We have red cabinet and cupboard doors. A thin layer of red cement covers the original gray cement of the floor. She uses red floor wax to spruce it up from time to time. She really likes the color red. The ceiling and walls are white, as is the trim of the cabinets.

The walls are made of cement and rebar, just like the house. We’ve already repaired earthquake cracks, more than twice. We replaced the roofing in 2019 with the same type of roofing we used for our carport, and we remodeled the main kitchen at the same time.

The Main Kitchen

We have yet to use the main kitchen for cooking since we remodeled it. Except for the microwave oven, of course. We don’t have any appliances, other than a gas stove, inside the dirty kitchen. That’s mainly because the door from the outside is almost always unlocked.

We don’t want our house to stink. Josie and her sisters (all seven of them) like to cook food that will stink up the entire house for hours. Things like dried fish. It’s hard to sleep when the air stinks around you. No amount of air fresheners can get rid of some odors. Josie plans to use the oven, but I don’t know when that will be. I look forward to her chicken enchiladas because that odor doesn’t bother me at all.

The main kitchen doesn’t have an island in the middle, like a lot of American homes (the picture above looks nothing like it). There’s a bar at the end that we’ve never used for what it was designed for, and we don’t even have any bar stools. Our refrigerator is on the other side of it. The counter tops in the main kitchen are made of granite, and the cabinets and cupboards are made of aluminum.

We don’t have a dishwasher. Like when we were young, we wash our dishes by hand.

Update May 2024

Josie finally used the oven in the kitchen, specifically to make chicken enchiladas!

Image by MeRyan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons