Putting the Labour in Labour Day

Oh, what to do when the kid is away??! Why, convert your coat closet into a pantry, of course. Silly you, why didn't you think of that, eh?

This is our coat closet.

It's perched atop our stairs just before the living room. The kitchen happens to be straight past morning, the first door on the right. (pardon the Peter Pan if you please) There isn't much in the way of cabinet space for the type of bulk buying we do, nor is there proper space for cookware and dishes. And since we live in a late 50's rambler with absolutely the bare minimum in storage space, we have to get creative on where we store our food.


This kind of "creativity" was really wearing on me. The top of the fridge isn't the best place for anything, let alone, cereal boxes with flimsy seals! We won't even discuss aesthetics. It's like wallpapering you kitchen with a picture of the local grocer's cereal aisle around here.


And well, our extra food storage space was down on a couple of shelves in the laundry room in the basement. Would you care for some dryer lint with your lasagna noodles? Bleech! Not to mention the near disasters i had occassionally when i'd forget how much chicken broth to bring up...then wouldn't bring enough and would practically burn dinner by the time i ran down stairs and returned with enough ingredient from the bowels of the dungeon.

And so i give you, the new & improved Pantry! (the crowd goes wild: yeeeaaah! woo hoo! hip hip hooray!)

Moose and i spent all weekend get things just so. We've ended up with so much room, that we were able to clear out the self immediately above our oven too. I didn't like having to store plastic bags of sugar, flour, grains, and oils mere inches from the biggest heat source in our kitchen, insulated only by the plywood that encases the stove just below this cabinet for reasons obvious to a cook. Moose wasn't comfortable with the set up due to fire hazards or something silly like that.

As you can imagine, a cabinet at twice the height and with the same width and depth of an oven is pretty hard to manage "stock" in too (as you'll note by all the salt!)

So now with the shelves cleaned out, i can remove my oils from the counter (which is another piece of real estate that's at a premium in our home) and place them on the top shelf where they won't be directly heated up by the oven that cooks at 475 degrees when you've set it to 325. :o)

Also, below is new space to keep sheet pans and my cast iron skillet. No more taking them in and out of the oven every time i need to bake something. Maybe a couple cutting boards would go well in here too?

Just one final item: what in the world does one do with 4 full containers of plain salt and a box of rock salt?? Ei yi ei!