This kitchen was not only the heart of our home, it was the central hub. This is where we filmed our cooking show and grew our YouTube audience from 1000 subscribers to over 76,000 subscribers, one viewer at a time!
With each video, we welcomed friends and strangers into our home and gave away not only recipes, but snippets of our life, like when our “Yooniverse” expanded with a new member. So if I seem a little sappy saying goodbye to our little kitchen and home in our video, I hope you can see why.
By the time you see this, we would’ve already moved. In fact, spoiler alert: I’m writing to you from the table of our NEW kitchen! And I’ll be honest…it’s going to take a while to make this place feel like ours. As of now, I’m still trying to settle in and find my footing here.
With our previous kitchen, we renovated it and had it custom built. I always wanted a white kitchen with blue walls, and that’s what we did.
You can hear me talk more about the design decisions in our kitchen tour video. It was the cheery place that made me smile every time I saw it, and it served us well for the past 6 years.
It had its flaws. It wasn’t ideal for filming a cooking show. Joe was usually smashed up against a window accompanied by two cameras and a pair of studio lights. The AC was too loud for filming, so we had to keep it off even with the summer heat, and I had to constantly mop the sweat off my brow. And for most scenes, I was constantly contorting my body, just so you could see that perfect sizzle in the pan.
It was small. It wasn’t perfect. But it was ours.
Previous to owning our condo, we had always rented. So we moved from kitchen to kitchen EVERY year, and I never had a chance to grow an attachment. You may even remember our first kitchen tour from California. Give it a watch…it’s a good laugh. It proves that it doesn’t matter what your kitchen looks like. Anyone can cook, using what they’ve got.
But still…deep down inside, as a chef, I longed for stainless steel appliances. I wanted cabinets with glass panes. I longed for granite countertops…and this was my first taste of it all. Go back and watch this video of me cooking spaghetti squash with easy meat sauce. It was the very first time we shot an episode from our new kitchen and you can tell how satisfied and at peace I am.
Then do you remember when we hit our first 1000 subscribers? We celebrated by eating spicy ramen. You guys…it still makes me laugh. It was painfully sweet because we were torturing ourselves while showing you our appreciation. We grew that audience one video at a time, without gimmicks, so we couldn’t have been prouder or more thankful.
And then do you remember us celebrating 25,000 subscribers? I was pregnant then, so we did the baby food challenge. We were full of anticipation and a little nervousness at how our channel (and lives) would change once we had a baby. And boy…did it ever!
But now I embrace the change. Change isn’t bad…sometimes it stretches us. Sometimes it makes you pivot and adapt. Remember how I filmed making Jam Bars with my new sous chef?
So now we moved to a house y’all. Yes my friends, we have our very own house for the first time, and it still feels slightly weird. We are definitely loving and appreciating having more space! There’s great sunlight in here and toys are no longer swallowing our entire living space.
There are still a lot of things to fix and we’ve already encountered the “joy” of home ownership with a broken dishwasher, minor flood, mold in the basement, and mouse problem. But we learned to lean into the challenges and not sweat the small stuff.
It will all get done, and it’s okay for our place to not look PERFECT before we start filming again. You’ll just get to see it morph little by little…and I think that’s pretty neat too.
I hope you join us for the ride on our vlog channel, Life with Julie Yoon, as I tackle some DIY projects and take you thrifting with me to furnish and decorate our space! I’ll try to keep you updated here every now and then as well.
Because we just moved in, understandably, the kitchen still doesn’t seem like mine. I miss our white kitchen with blue walls. I long for our custom-built pull out pantry. But there’s always an opportunity to start something new. And I’m learning that I don’t have to tackle it all at once. This will be a good practice in patience for me I’m sure!
I don’t feel like our kitchen belongs to only us. I feel like it’s yours too. We invite you into our kitchen and home with every video and vlog, and it becomes a part of your life too. So we hope we can make it a cozy and familiar place for all of us to feel settled soon.
Thanks for joining me in our kitchen, whichever one it is, one recipe and technique at a time. It’s hard to say goodbye, but we will say hello once again.
X0, Julie
