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!

Our Improvements

In the eighteen months or so that we lived at our second house (Next House), we did surprisingly little to actually make the house itself our own. I'm going to propose the excuse that we spent almost all of our time landscaping as a pretty good reason for this. And obviously with a brand new home there's generally no requirement to replace anything. That said, from the time we moved in to the time we moved out, apart from some window coverings, we didn't really make our mark on the inside of the house at all.

To give us some credit though, there were two little projects that we undertook to make the house more liveable (not that it wasn't liveable before!). Here's a sneak peak. I'll post more details about them soon.

 

Our Curvy Garden

The final piece in the puzzle that was our landscaping at our second house (Next House) was creating Our Curvy Garden. This is what I have christened the little area next to our driveway that I insisted on making larger by having a curvy driveway (see here).

Step 1: Concreting. Tom got to work concreting the little area at the bottom of the driveway where we planned to store our rubbish bins (after installing a drain).

We remembered just in time that we wanted to extend our sprinkler system across from the other side of the front yard, so we ran it through the black drain at the bottom of the driveway, and that's the pipe curled up on the concrete there.

Those steel poles sticking out of the concrete were part of my grand plan to eventually have a Chinese Star Jasmine vine growing around that little concreted area to completely disguise the rubbish bins. To help this process along, we drilled some holes in the posts at carefully spaced intervals (also being careful to paint the holes with some rust-proof paint), then we ran some wire through the holes so we had some horizontal rungs (for want of a better word) that the vine could grow over and climb up.

Step 2: More concreting. Building a baby retaining wall out of leftover concrete blocks to follow the curve of the driveway, to allow the garden to be fairly level instead of falling at the same rate of the driveway. The added advantage of doing this? Partially covering up the rubbish bins. You'll note that we left a bit of space between the driveway and the wall, because we decided that the driveway needed a little bit of extra width so we didn't crash into the wall reversing out every day.

Step 3: More digging. Like we hadn't had enough already.

Allie kept an eye on proceedings, as always.

The process of digging away all of the bad dirt from this area was especially awful, because it had been our main dumping ground for all sorts of not-good-for-plants items like broken bricks and the like up until this point.

 

Not only that, but for a reason we couldn't understand, we kept coming across random bits of heshen-y, felt-y sort of material and rocks upon rocks upon rocks. We couldn't figure it out until we remembered this:

Where we were digging what was to become my beautiful curvy garden, had been our old driveway (since buried under mounds of yukky dirt). So the builders had obviously not only dumped a whole bunch of rocks there to make the driveway easier to use, but first laid down a piece of material that then had to be torn away bit by bit as we tried to dig up the dirt and rocks. Not fun. I wish I had more pictures.

But as usual, with a bit of determination we got there, and could move onto the next stage.

Step 4: Putting nice dirt and plants in!

We also made sure we put a bit of drainge behind the retaining wall so it doesn't have water problems later.

My nicely laid out plants.

The view from the front.

Step 5: The Letterbox. Later, we finally upgraded the letterbox from the temporary one we bought from a demolition yard for $10 (since Tom destroyed the original letterbox when we were demolishing Our First House), and forked out the dough for a sparkly new one. Here it is just after being concreted in, with our hastily scavenged supports to prevent it from slipping while the concrete set.

Step 6: Finishing the wall. Later again (it's a bit shameful how long the wall sat there unfinished), we painted the wall in the same render paint that we painted the back Slow Retaining Wall in, and capped the top with all our leftover driveway pavers that had been sitting around, cut to follow the curve of the wall. And in line with the way these things always seemed to work out, we had JUST enough pavers to completely cover the wall, with only one leftover. You can actually see them all lined up on top of the El Cheapo Retaining Wall in one of the earlier photos if you scroll up.
 

And here it is from the front again. Please ignore the stray waterbottle. It's protecting the top of a star picket that still needs to be hammered completely into the ground (it's holding that purple sleeper along the front in place).

And that completes the landscaping of our Next House! Click here to see the entire house in its finished state.
 

Our Next House Landscaping