Pantry Beautification Complete!
MagdalenaLee
9 years ago
I have no idea how SunnyCottage painted her whole kitchen so fast. This little pantry took forever! But it's done, it was cheap, huge improvement and I couldn't be happier.
So when we built the house, the pantry was always meant to have a base cabinet but it didn't happen during the build. So the shelves were put in with space to allow for the cabinet. It's not shown in the before picture, but we had a free standing wire shelf under the built-in shelves. It looked terrible but was functional. Here's the before pic:
DH beefed up the shelves with a piece of trim and we purchased a cheap unfinished oak cabinet from Lowes. We had leftover tile from our laundry room reno and that's what we used for the counter top in the pantry.
The pantry is 5x7 (cabinet on the 5ft wall). Travertine tile, SW Oyster White on the walls and shelves (but different sheens), SW Brainstorm Bronze on the cabinet (thanks Aktillery9 for using it and Jlc712 for suggested it!), pulls and knobs with antique copper finish were left overs from kitchen. DH and I did everything ourselves, all told I think we spent about $350. DH wants to do under cab lighting but I think I'm done!
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Garden a COMPLETE bust! Ready to dig it up and give up completely
Comments (11)I can hear that you're very frustrated, but I don't understand why you want to take such drastic measures, lol. Though, I have thought about scrapping the whole thing from time to time. I'm a first time gardener. I have to tell you that we had snow on May first, lol, so it sounds like we have similar areas. If your squash are otherwise healthy, you shouldn't get flowers until now anyway. Spray the evil bugs off with your garden hose and then give em a real good spray with soapy water. I was a little freaked out over a few different kinds of good bugs in my garden (ex: pill bugs eat compost). Are your cucumbers small because they've just formed? Or do they need to be pollinated? If they're healthy, they'll just keep producing more cukes until a few get pollinated correctly and one grows to full ripeness. If you planted in mid-May, most tomato varieties won't be ready to produce yet, lol. I have two romas that are two feet tall. Every other plant is four feet tall or taller, but those romas I started a bit later (mid-May, btw) and haven't started their real growth yet. One of them has decided to keep up with the Joneses and is trying to produce, and that has it's own set of issues. Overall, if your leaves are green, you're doing just fine. Toss a bit of compost on those squash and get rid of those bugs. One word of caution is, if those little bugs you found are squash bugs, I understand they'll saw right through your stems, so you should take immediate, decisive action. It doesn't sound like them from your description. IMHO: you're doing just fine, you're entering the home stretch, don't give up just yet. Grace, Carolyn P....See MoreAnyone remove their pantry & put cabinets instead?Also 24' pantry
Comments (12)Honestly, I'm confused. How big is your pantry closet? 36" long x 24" deep? Or is it 36" long by 36" deep and you want to narrow the depth to 24" and put a 12" deep cabinet BEHIND it? I cannot picture this at all! Do you have cabinets next to the fridge right now or just a deep pantry closet? OK, well, you only have a coat closet if you completely get rid of the pantry closet, therefore I say that you must have at a minimum a 24"x24" utility / broom closet. As far as an actual "pantry" goes, it's hard to say without a floorplan. A well designed pantry is invaluable, a poorly designed pantry is a major waste of space. If you have a small kitchen and lack counterspace then you may be better off without a pantry, but usually that would be replacing it with 24" deep base cabs and 12" deep uppers. You still need storage space - the equivalent of what your pantry held at least. A "pantry" stores food. A "closet" stores non-food items such as cleaning supplies and, well, yes, dog food too. A pantry can be replaced with the equivalent in cabinets (drawer base - regular base cabs are just as bad as a poorly designed pantry). Food and non-food items should have separate storage spaces - otherwise you end up with a mess as you apparently have right now (as do I - my pantry is poorly designed and at the opposite end of the dining room diagonally across from the kitchen - I don't know what the builder was thinking). Note that a 24" deep pantry only works if it is a pull-out, otherwise 12-15" shelves are the way to go....See MoreStreet Beautification Competition
Comments (7)Our town has a Garden Club and the members volunteered to plant and water the planters in the business district. We also have hanging baskets and the township waters them from a truck. The Garden club tried the competition route once but the results from the business owners was underwhelming. Is this a residential area? If so I think it's a shame that the owners aren't interested in doing this themselves - all the time. In my SIL's neighborhood several neighbors got together and planned a First Saturday in June Day. They went to a local nursery and got discounted prices for easy care bedding plants and bagged mulch then distributed a flyer to everyone on the street with a price list and a photo of a completed bedding area. They were even willing to have the plants and mulch delivered if the residents would pay up front. It took a few years but after a while most of the residents joined in....See MorePantry moths...to prevent them in my new kitchen/pantry
Comments (62)benjesbride, raebutt (what a name?! lol) - sorry; I'm a bad contributor here -- I used to lurk way too much some while ago but am completely out of the habit now .... My experience - it was actually a really long time ago now and I don't remember well. What I bought though was not "hermetically sealed" - I'm not sure, to tell you the truth, what that means practically speaking. What I bought at first was a whole large bunch of small to huge (and expensive) glass jars with those wire snaps and a gasket about the glass lid. I thought those would keep the air out but it's not so. Or at least those moths got around. As others have noted, they can and seem to "worm" their way in and around jar top threads even. They are so gross I hate thinking about this.... I honestly don't remember what happened long ago. I remember giving up on buying those jars because it wasn't helping. I think I had OK luck with just taking juice jars and screwing them mind-bogglingly tight. But it wasn't reliable and it sure wasn't fun to open those things. That's when I had The Conversation. They recommended Cambro food service containers. I was skeptical because they don't pretend to be air-tight. Again, it's seemingly worked for me though I'm sure the instant I type this we'll be invaded. You can buy these containers large enough to hold a 25lb bag of flour, which I do. I hesitate to confess this here because - speaking of gross - I'm sure many of you will be hugely disapproving of many aspects of the following story. But here goes: we left the country for a year and I left a bunch - maybe a half dozen - of these containers with grains and food stuffs in them, with those trusty bay leaves: not a speck. Again, I swear I can hear those little wings get fired up by the challenge to hear this! lol So that's my experience. As mentioned I did have that infestation recently in rice that was not protected. At the advice of a friend I tossed that stuff in the freezer in a bag, shook it and sieved it (talk about gross) and then since rice gets washed before using anyway, I ate the stuff up. Protein's protein, right?...See MoreMagdalenaLee
9 years agoMagdalenaLee
9 years ago
mustangs81
9 years agoI would love a counter/base cabinet in the pantry like yours, good job.
To give me more storage for pantry items, I put cabinets in the laundry room.
I
found 3 cabinets at Lowe's clearance area THAT MATCHED my laundry room
cabinets for $33 each. The other side of the far end wall is a vacant
area of the garage. So I had my BIL push out the wall and install the 3
Lowe's cabinets thus providing extra pantry storage.
writersblock (9b/10a)
9 years agolast modified: 9 years ago
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