Momma’s Kitchen by the Guys from Texas

Back in 2006, I took a class with the Jon Fish and Larry Osborn, aka the Guys from Texas, at a (now closed) store named The Miniature Scene. They were offering two workshops while they were in town: a 1:12 Craftsman roombox named Oak Shadow, and a 1:24 kitchen roombox in a flour canister named Momma’s Kitchen.

I did the 1:12 class because I loved the Craftsman style and I hadn’t yet been fully bitten by the half scale bug.

It was a great class and I love my finished roombox (even if it has been sitting empty and gathering dust since I moved four years ago), but I always had a pang of regret for not taking the Momma’s Kitchen class. The Guys from Texas later added sugar and tea canisters to the set.

Fast forward eighteen years… I finally nabbed an unbuilt Momma’s Kitchen off eBay!

I took a second Guys from Texas class in 2010 (Cypress and Fog), and in both cases they did a lot of prep work and supplied everything needed to finish the structure. This is also true of Momma’s Kitchen, which came with the cabinets and all of the materials to finish the kitchen, including electrical, flooring, and even paint.

The cabinets, door, and window are cast resin that have already been painted off-white.

Cassidy Creations, which at this time was owned by Kathy Moore, sold a resin stove, fridge, and sink to go with this roombox. According to a comment Kathy made on Facebook: “The resin stove and motor-top fridge were originals cast by Larry, given to me as birthday presents so that I would be able to provide them to most participants via my shop, Scale Designs.”

I happen to have one of each of these that I bought from Scale Designs at the time, and have been using the fridge and stove in the Mansard Victorian.

As luck would have it (if “luck” means “way too much time wasted on eBay”), I recently acquired an older Cassidy Creations fridge kit that’s metal and has an opening door. I was already planning to use that one in the Mansard Victorian (once I work up the courage to build it), so I can move the resin fridge to the roombox.

I don’t have an extra stove, and I want to keep this one in the Mansard since the cabinets were built to fit around it. So I have to find another stove for the roombox.

The Cassidy Creations apron-front sink always confused me because it has a (fake) drawer etched into the front of it. Now that I see how the sink is integrated into the cabinet, it makes more sense.

Not sure if I’ll use this hutch here, but it does fit nicely in that corner without getting in the way of the other cabinets. I bought this on eBay many years ago and don’t know who painted it.

I dug around in my stash looking for other stove options. This one is an Acme magnet. It looks too plastic and I’m not sure how I would remove the base that’s attached to the feet.

This kit might turn out nicer?

I started to build it, but I’m not really feeling this either. (Also swapped the hutch for a pie safe. Is a pie safe appropriate for this era?)

I also have a resin Avon stove that’s similar. It’s currently in the Gull Bay, which is a pull-apart house that’s sitting high up on a bookshelf. I didn’t feel like getting it down and pulling the house apart to pilfer the stove (potentially breaking something in the process, as I am wont to do), and I suspect it would look too fake anyway.

Okay, so maybe I could buy something? Pretty Small Things on Shapeways has this 3D printed Wedgewood stove. This one is wider than the Cassidy Creations stove, and would take up more of the wall without space for a hutch.

It’s $28, which seemed high but splurge-worthy… until tax, shipping, and “processing” brought the price up to $40. 3D printed items can be hit or miss, and I didn’t feel great about spending that much on something that might not work out.

Especially when I could spend less than $10 on this Marx stove.

Compared to the Cassidy Creations stove, it looks small.

But when I put it next to the cabinets, the size seems okay. Maybe I can add something to the bottom to raise it up slightly.

With the stove question sort of out of the way (who are we kidding, I’ll probably change my mind five more times by the end of this), I tackled the first step of the instructions: painting. Usually I prefer wallpaper, because it’s quicker and easier to get a nice finish, but the kitchen’s walls are already primed and the yellow paint that came with the kit is still good after all these years, so I decided to roll with it.

I think this is latex paint that’s been thinned with water. I learned this method for applying paint in the Guys from Texas classes I took: you spread it with the foam brush and then lightly tap with a moistened sponge, and the paint dries without any brush strokes. This piece is the back of the pantry.

The kitchen wall structure lifts out of the container for easier access.

I went back and forth about whether to paint the back area of the glass cabinet yellow, and decided to do it so I wouldn’t have to find a match for the already-painted cabinets. In hindsight I think it should be the same color as the cabinet.

Now that I finally have a Momma’s Kitchen flour canister, I would love to get my hands on the sugar and tea canisters too. I have a saved search on eBay for “guys from Texas” that somehow failed to alert me to a sugar and tea set that just sold this past weekend. They were quarter scale, but I still wish I’d had an opportunity to bid.

Here are a few pics from that auction.

Each canister is supposed to be from different era — the kitchen is 1930s, the breakfast nook is 1950s, and the laundry room is 1970s.