Our Dirty Kitchen
Written on Apr 28, 2026
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.
Some people build their dirty kitchens away from their houses, and others build theirs adjoining their houses, like we did. 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.
The 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 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 cabinets with aluminum due to termite damage.
My wife, Josie, chose the colors for the dirty kitchen. We have red cabinet doors. A thin layer of red cement covers the original gray cement of the floor. 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 simultaneously.
The Main Kitchen
We rarely use the oven or the stove-top for cooking. If we need to fry or boil something, we use the stove in the dirty kitchen. We use the microwave oven and the turbo air fryer for everything else.
We don't want our house to stink. Josie and her six sisters enjoy preparing dishes so pungent that they would fill the whole house with odor for hours. Things like dried fish. It's hard to stay in the house when the air stinks around you.
No amount of air fresheners can get rid of some odors. Not all odors are bad, of course. Josie cooks things in the oven that smell wonderful, like banana bread and chicken enchiladas.
The main kitchen doesn't have an island in the middle, like most modern American homes (the picture looks nothing like it). We’ve never used the bar at the end for its intended purpose, and we don’t have any bar stools. Our refrigerator is on the other side of it.
The counter tops in the main kitchen are made of granite, including the bar, and the cabinets are made of aluminum. We don't have a dishwasher. Like when we were young, we wash our dishes by hand.
Image by MeRyan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons