The most essential thing in my kitchen is my knife skills. Not my knife. My knife skills.
Knife skills are great because they instantly convert "Man, we should buy an appliance so we can get dinner made faster" to "Yes! I get to chop an onion!" It is immensely pleasurable to dice an onion, or mince garlic, or matchstick cut a carrot.
It wasn't always this way. I actually spent some time on YouTube looking at videos on how to use my knife better. Skills are skills because you have to work at them.
My chef's knife cost $35 or $40, and I bought it as a separate.It's a Henckels forged something something. I've never found a knife set that made sense; they always came with extra crap I didn't want. I like to ogle the $150 chef's knives but what I have works very well, so there's no reason to upgrade.
To maintain my knives, I have a magnetic strip on the wall I stick my chef's knife, paring knife, bread knife, some shears, and a honing steel (I don't have a boning knife, but sometimes I wish I did, skinning a fish is damn near impossible with a chef's knife). I also have a small manual sharpener in a drawer that was $3 on Amazon.
I hone whenever I use my knife. I'm not sure how often you're supposed to hone a knife, but I do it every time because it is super fun and manly and I feel like a cartoon villain when I do it. Whenever I hear that sound of my knife going over my honing steel I assume that all women within a square mile are impressed.
If the honing isn't cutting it (yuk yuk) I sharpen and then hone. I cook vegetarian at home, so I only sharpen every few months; I imagine someone cutting meat will do it more often.
The magnetic strip turned out to be one of my favorite things. Sticking your knives on the wall is a case on "in sight, in mind." It's a constant visual reminder that with only a couple of the most basic tools I am only a raw vegetable away from culinary pleasure. It's right there, practically begging me to take it off the wall and use my magic hands to concoct something delicious. And they act as a sort of kitchen decoration, too, looking very ordered and tidy
Avoid a knife block. The empty slots beg for you to buy more knives and they take up quite a bit of counter space. Next thing you know you're thinking you have a small kitchen when in reality you have a big block of inefficient wood on your counter. Then you buy bigger houses, with bigger knife blocks, and soon you buy a house with a knife block so big it will destroy you all! (Sorry, that ended up turning into a Simpsons reference.)