Pantry Perfection

 

I'm interrupting the regular programming with a bit of a blast from the past.

Meet our old pantry.

This was our fabulously large (and might I say equally fabulously well organised?) pantry at our last house. That's the house where everything was spick and span and fresh and new, a far cry from our current house.

And I am really really missing it now that we're in a house where we've installed a kitchen that didn't come with a pantry.

Particularly now that we've got rid of that gorgeous hutch, which was operating as my pantry!

But I digress.
I decided that it was high time I showed you what we once had.

I had a shelf for appliances...

I invested in a whole heap of lazy susans so I could get to all my jars of things even at the very back...

 And speaking of jars, I splurged and bought myself a mountain of jam-preserving type jars in varying sizes, for some nice cohesive storage of all the dry ingredients.

All the spare ingredients (i.e. the refills) lived in a little CD/DVD cabinet that I bought from Officeworks for about $30 on the very top shelf...

And then there was the cansolidator. Ahhh be still my beating heart. This ingenious plastic device allows you to slot canned food in on the top row, and it rolls down to the bottom, so you use everything in order, from oldest to youngest! It's genious, I tell you! No more piles of cans where the oldest ones are buried right at the back on the bottom row!

I found a deal online for ten of these little spice racks for a ridiculously low price (something like $1 each), and the little bit of wall to the left of the door inside the pantry was the perfect width for them.

And then on the inside of the door were a couple more spice racks, a roll dispenser (if that's the right word) - that you put your baking paper and cling wrap into (and the paper towels hang from the bottom), and my favourite, the plastic bag dispenser (the silver thing) to store those unwieldy plastic shopping bags neatly.

Sigh. Wasn't it perfect? It took me a while to get it to that stage, and then we moved house.

Oh to be that organised again!

The Weakest Link!

 

Whenever I hear that phrase I think of dear old Morag from Home & Away (no, I'm afraid I can't say I'm an avid H&A fan, but I've seen my fair share of it over the years) being all nasty and eliminating contestants from Australia's version of the show of that same name.

Image sourced here

But I digress. Morag's not on my agenda today. We're back in the kitchen again! You'll recall this kitchen plan I very proudly came up with to use all of our secondhand cabinets in what I hoped would be a looks-like-they-were-designed-for-it way.

Well there was a fairly significant flaw in either my plan or my measurements (or both), because the little corner in the bottom left has been causing me problems. According to my plan, there should be plenty of room to have a nice little sink in the corner there, with the dishwasher a bit further along on the peninsula.

But there isn't.

If we extended the bench around the corner there to meet up with the hutch as per my plan, you wouldn't even be able to reach the taps with the sink jammed in the corner (it will eventually be a sink instead of a laundry tub, I promise).

As you can see, my original plan had me chopping up this set of three cabinets to dot them around the kitchen and allow some room for the dishwasher, although I'm really struggling with that part of the plan now that they work so nicely as a peninsula all on their own.

Forgetting the peninsula problem for a moment though, this sink scenario (oh yes, I'm an alliterating genius!) is what's bothering me the most, though. There is nowhere else for it to go. I flatly refuse to relocate the oven, which is going to be so beautiful roughly centred along the back wall with a single window on either side - it satisfies my craving for symmetry perfectly (although it's not quite in its eventual position yet in this photo). We definitely can't move the fridge anywhere else (if only because he's way too comfortable in his new house now)

I briefly considered the idea of popping the sink in the peninsula itself, but that's virtually my only nice sized bench space. I really don't want to lose it!

So, I very begrudgingly turned my attention to this beautiful guy.

This monster of a hutch was the very first brand new piece of furniture Tom and I ever bought together, while we were living in our very first house.

The only pictures I seem to have of it in location there are here on the side where Tom is being attacked by Allie on the floor...

And here in the background when I was perusing our construction loan documents to build our second house...

It moved with us into our flashy new second house once it was built...

And in our current much smaller (and with virtually no door-less or window-less living area wall space) house, I thought I'd incorporated him beautifully into our kitchen design, along the only wall that he could possibly fit against in the entire house.

But it's reached the point where I have to choose between him and having a kitchen sink that is actually functional and suggests that we did in fact put some thought into planning the kitchen layout.

And I've realised that holding onto him for sentimental value at the price of making our kitchen perfect is not a great plan.

Plus, when I manage to score other hutches for $75 on Gumtree, it's not like he's totally irreplacable, right?

It's amazing how, once you actually stop screaming "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO" at even the suggestion of changing something like this, it doesn't take long to completely resign yourself to it and move on. It was the same for our decision to move to our current house from our second house, the house we planned on living in until our kids left home (which would have been quite some time since we don't even have human babies yet - Allie doesn't exactly count, does she?). Is there a life lesson in there somewhere?

So we emptied him, and popped him on Ebay and began his banishment from the kitchen. I may or may not have said "Mr Hutch, you are THE WEAKEST LINK" in my fiercest voice in the process...

And he's gone! Sold for $500 it's a far cry from what we originally paid for him, but we're getting more and more comfortable with that with the more items we part with (and the secondhand bargains we get on the flipside). And Dishy the Dishwasher is getting very comfortable in his new home.

The kitchen feels so much roomier and lighter now! And it's really made the world of difference to the functionality plan. Imagine a beautiful big 1.5 bowl sink right there to the left of Dishy, with the draining board sitting above him. So. Much. Better!

Interestingly enough, that makes this kitchen's layout amazingly similar to the layout of the kitchen in our last house! We're creatures of habit, what can we say?

And what's more, this change has opened up another area of the kitchen for yet another much more practical makeover! Oh the suspense! I'll let you wait with baited breath while I get around to writing about that one...