Building a kitchen for our tiny house on wheels

Wow, the floor is done but there’s no time to rest because now the place is ready for the fit-out. Since our tiny house is not your standard-size house we need some custom tiny house furniture and, of course, we’re making the furniture ourselves. We’re starting with the tiny house kitchen.

Our kitchen bench

We tackled the kitchen first. Neither Paul nor I have carpentry experience so building a kitchen bench from scratch was a challenge. Another challenge was to keep the kitchen as lightweight as possible. After all, we’re building a tiny house on a trailer, so weight restrictions are always a big concern.

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To keep the weight down we used 7mm plywood. Truth to be told, I wasn’t sure if this would work. The ply seemed to be very flimsy.  But as we put the pieces together our kitchen became stronger. In the last step, we screwed the back of the kitchen into our steel frame. Our kitchen is now rock-solid and secure in place should we need to move the tiny house.

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Our under-stairs storage

Since we’re living in a tiny space, we wanted to max out every single bit of space. So utilising the space under our staircase makes sense. In fact, we have so much space under the stairs that we’re able to fit our pantry, additional storage space and our fridge in it.

Firstly, we started to build drawers for our pantry. We calculated that we would have enough space for 4 large drawers and 1 small drawer because of the protruding wheel arch. Building the drawers is straightforward, the tricky bit is to get the partitions and rails right. The alignment for both has to be precise otherwise the drawers won’t close.

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Next, we had to build a little stand for our fridge so it would sit on top of the wheel arch. The fridge stand is pretty much the same as the little stand we built for the oven.

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To get even more storage space out of the under staircase we added two shelves on top of the pantry and the fridge. Lastly, we made a little door for our storage space next to the pantry. This little bit of extra room contains things like the vacuum cleaner, a broom, the router and other things you don’t want to stand around in your house.

Our tiny house kitchen

In numbers, our kitchen bench is around 3m long and 95cm high. We used 7mm pine wood ply and a pinewood benchtop. Keep in mind that pine is a softwood so it’s not ideal as a benchtop but we’re more concerned about weight at this stage.

In total, it took us three weekends to complete our DIY kitchen. We’re quite happy with the result. There’s enough space for the sink, our standard size oven, the two cooktops, the fridge, all our kitchen equipment, as well as plates, cups, glasses and bowls. What more can you ask from a tiny house DIY kitchen?