My kitchen is huge and messy, with not enough work space and not enough storage space.
It is the second largest room in our house. (It would be the largest, but the living room and dining room are combined into one "great room".
We have far, far too much kitchen stuff! Part of the problem is that this is now two kitchens combined. Because I used to have my own house, with a full and well-stocked kitchen. Hosting dinner parties was my primary social activity prior to moving out to the Booming Metropolis. When I sold my house and moved in with my parents, I did not want to get rid of any of my kitchen things, since I used all of them extensively.
My mother, on the other hand, is not a cook. She never hosts dinner parties and mostly eats ready-made dinners from the grocery store and takeout. She is, however, a shopper. Oh my but does that woman love to shop! If there is a kitchen gadget anywhere that she has seen, she has probably bought it. And never used it.
The price stickers on the above items are all from stores I know my mother has not shopped in in over 20 years. And she has never even taken these items out of their boxes!
Then there's this:
Also more than 20 years old. Also has never been removed from its box. Because it is an onion chopper. And my mother does not eat onions.*
*She does, in fact, eat onions. She just does not know that she eats onions. She refuses to eat my cooking because she knows I put onions in it. But she doesn't read the ingredients lists on the ready-made meals and sauces she buys, almost all of which have onions in them. In any case, she doesn't ever cook with onions herself and consequently has no need of an "onion chopper". But she owns one.
An entire double cupboard in our storage-space-challenged kitchen is filled floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall with these types of owned and never used gadgets. (And my mother has even more stored in her own bedroom and the supposed-"guest room" (which is really a junk storage room).
I also discovered this in the never-used gadgets cupboard:
It is a giant roll of plastic wrap which, as you can see, is taller than my knee height.
My father used to work for a company that makes flexible packaging. Sometimes he would bring home reject products for us to use. We never purchased sandwich bags for school lunches when I was a kid, because we always had free bags from my father's work. We for the most part did not purchase garbage bags or cling wrap for the same reason. But my father had to stop working due to his MS more than twenty years ago. And this roll of plastic wrap is even older than that. I'm fairly certain it's the same roll I was using to wrap my sandwiches in when I was in high school. But we have been buying cling wrap from the grocery store regularly since moving out to the Booming Metropolis, because my mother had hidden this massive roll of wrap away, and I did not know we still had it!
Note the well-stocked spice rack (to the left of the refrigerator in the top photo above). These are all spices that my mother purchased, in many case more than 40 years ago. She has not used them because of the whole rarely cooking thing. I, on the other hand, cook in large quantities. And I spice my food heavily. My spices live in the cupboard above the dishwasher (alongside even more of my mother's glass jars of spices), because I buy them in bulk whenever possible, and they mostly go directly from the bags I buy them in into my cooking pots. (It would be ridiculously expensive for me to buy spices in frou-frou little glass jars like my mother does.)
And so it goes.
I hugely miss having my own kitchen. It is challenging to be a heavy kitchen-user and have to share the space with someone who is one's polar opposite in kitchen habits.