Drawers: they’re not just for silverware anymore

A couple of weeks ago a much-loved inspirator issued a challenge: organize something in your house. Well, slap my rear and call me Suzy, that was right up my alley! Better yet, I had already begun the arduous task of rearranging my kitchen cabinets.

I started with the glassware cabinet. I won’t bore you with the “befores” and “afters,” but I think it’s kind of humorous to see all of the “durings;” we have some pretty funky stuff up there (comes with the territory when your husband was a bartender for 18 years).

 

The Smirnoff glasses have little baseball cut-outs in the bottoms - cute!

 

But the transformation I’m most proud of is what I did with the main cabinet where I kept the spices. I took ALL of the silverware out of the drawer right below it (and we’re working with 25 + year old, builder-grade cabinets, and this drawer was extra long… loaded down with cutlery these three plus years, I felt like the fool thing was going to collapse every time I opened it!) and transferred my spices there!

  

Now they don’t get lost in the cabinet, where there is “dead” space you can’t really see into (and boy do tiny little bottles like to get lost in there). I can’t tell you how many duplicates I found.

Then, I took a couple of those polka-dotted glasses and some coffee mugs that don’t go with our color scheme any more, and I used them to store the forks and spoons in the cabinet! Genius, I tell you, pure genius.

Electrical work on tall ladders is for the birds

First off, kudos to the hubby for scoring us a free 5-blade ceiling fan with light kit from Freecycle. Even if it was really ugly metal with even uglier glass globes, nothing a little spray paint and a trip to Homer couldn’t fix. We borrowed an 8-foot ladder in hopes of hanging said ceiling fan in the dining room where we have a vaulted ceiling. Ladder didn’t allow us to reach all the way up to the ceiling to unattach the ceiling cap and pole so we could paint those as well… but maybe we could either live with the wretched shiny brass – since the new fan will be such a pretty white – or try to paint them in place with a brush taped onto an extension pole.

However… we did not anticipate it would be such a PAIN IN THE ASS to connect the wiring 10 feet in the air, using one hand to hold up the very heavy fan motor and the other to twist and tape wires together… and then shove the whole mess up into the pole or down into the fan body, and then use a bolt and cotter pin to hang the motor assembly from the pre-existing pole. No, we didn’t think it would be that difficult at all. Well, Murphy sure had a field day with us.

On the upside, we did manage to hang a very pretty hand-me-down light fixture from my sister-in-law over the stairwell, and it looks so very lovely. And very bright. Now the wall leading up the stairs – not to mention the carpet and ancient wall paint – looks very very bland. We need some good statement art to justify such a bright and cheerful light.

Them’s designer blown-glass globes, I’ll have you know

On the downside, the dining room looks even more like a disaster area than it did when we started, and we have no ceiling fan for the moment, just a pole of about 8 feet sticking down with raw wires coming out. I guess that isn’t a problem unless we inadvertently turn on the switch that controls the fan, in which case it shouldn’t be a problem unless the raw wires touch each other. In which case, ka-boom! And then we won’t have to worry about wiring the ceiling fan!

Ode on a Grecian Canning Jar

Well maybe not a Grecian canning jar… but man-o-man do I love a good canning jar – so many uses. For instance, you can use them to cook and store your own beans. Cook up a one-pound bag of beans – black, pinto, kidney, garbanzo, you name it – and it’ll yield you three pint jars of salt-free, protein-packed beanage you can (should!) keep in the freezer. That’s about the same volume you’d get if you bought three cans of beans at the grocery store. It takes a while to soak and cook the beans, but the cost difference and health benefits alone (we’re a sodium-watching household) make it worth our while.

Or, the next time you make pancakes, make extra batches of the dry ingredients and store them in pint jars. Again, freezer is best, just because you don’t know how well the different ingredients might play together; after all, there are no preservatives in my favorite pancake recipe.

“I like coffee with my pancakes,” you might say. No problem! A pint jar is perfect for storing coffee beans in an airtight container, right inside your decorative Cafe canister.

“I don’t have time for pancakes and coffee! I have a pantload of tomatoes from my garden that I have to figure out what to do with.” Well look no further. Make up a big batch of tomato sauce and store it in canning jars!

I bet you Keats didn’t love his Grecian urn half as much as I love my jars.

Copy Cat

I just saw this post a few days ago at Young House Love, and I thought it was such a good idea I had to copy it myself. ‘Cept I did it a little differently, in the spirit of using stuff up that we already owned.

See, instead of prefab cork boards, I used some old picture frames, particle board, a roll of cork, and some fabric we had lying around. Yes, we really had these things just lying around. All I had to buy was the oil-rubbed bronze spray paint, ribbon, cup hooks (you can NEVER have too many spare cup hooks lying around!), and thumb tacks. Pretty neat, huh?

Ladies, the next time your husband drives up to an office park, hands you an open pocket knife, and says, “go cut us a piece of that plant, honey, and let’s see if we can root it,” DON’T DO IT!!!

Especially if you are en route to your mother-in-law’s house for dinner. Because if you are anything like me, you will slice the ever-loving HELL out of your thumb – you know, the one on your DOMINANT HAND.

If you’ve ever sliced a strawberry into your cereal, and you used the old blade-against-the-thumb technique, you should know that said pocket knife is way sharper than any of the knives in your kitchen and to try to cut a plant like that is a recipe for disaster.

But now to the point of my story – make sure your medicine cabinet is stocked! My wonderful husband (yes, by now I’ve stopped being peeved about my thumb) put a whole first aid kit in ours, which is making the healing process go a lot smoother. Some things we always keep handy:

• Antibiotic ointment
• Band aids
• Aspirin (because too much ibuprofen or acetaminophen can be bad for your liver)
• Electronic thermometer (way easier to read than the old mercury kind)
• Rubbing alcohol (to sanitize aforementioned thermometer – mouthwash can also work in a pinch)
• Finger cots (because cooking is so much more difficult when you’re trying to keep a band aid dry on your DOMINANT HAND)

Funny aside – when I was a teenager I had a job at a deli, and one day I came across a bag of finger cots… I didn’t know what they were, and suffice it to say, I was a little grossed out. I mean, what was boss lady doing with those in the kitchen, and why were they so… small?!?

So those are some of the basics, but hopefully you won’t need them anytime soon.

By the way, can anyone help me out with what kind of plant looks like a cross between a poinsettia and a coleus, with stalks about five feet tall and fuzzy growths along the top of the stem that might be flowers? My husband wants one.

Who doesn’t love a story about cat poo?

One of the first things we did when we moved into our house about three-and-a-half years ago is move the cats’ litter boxes into the garage. After two-plus years of the coat closet in our already-too-small condo being home to the boxes for two gigantic cats, one of whom liked to pee on the tile by the front door, we were ready to NOT live near that anymore. That was around the time I was working as a carpenter, and I was eager to put my new skills to the test.

Fortunately our garage is positioned right beside the den, and we were able to cut a hole in the wall and connect the two rooms by a cat door attached to a tunnel I fashioned out of MDF (with wood trim on the den side).

(Please ignore the stereo cables, old carpet, and general un-paint-edness of the room... we're only human, people!)

 

Of course, we didn’t want to let the brats roam freely through the garage, so we frankensteined together a little cage out of a dog crate that we could shove up to the wall where the opening was. It even has easy access for the semi-weekly cleaning.

Perfection! It worked then, and to this day it keeps our den stinky-free. At least, we think it does… we’re used to it now, so if anyone comes to visit and can still smell the kitty poo, we apologize in advance.

A note about the litter, though – organic pine litter is not only far cheaper than the fancy clumping stuff, it really cuts down on the smell. Now that there are three kitties this is extra important. It (ie, used litter with the poo scooped out) supposedly makes good garden fertilizer too, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to go there.

Awww, looka dat mug!