Adjusting Our Pantries

When last we left our heroine, she was standing in her pantry, considering the squalor...

PANTRY.

PAN -- TRRRREEEEE.

I said PANTRY. Geez people!  Get your minds out of the gutter.




It was pretty bad.  Despite what this photos suggest, this is a strangely tiny room.  We suspect it was a breakfast nook, a room that was very popular in 1920s bungalow.  The thing is that we already have a dining room, and really don't need a second room devoted to eating.




On good days, we'd refer to this room as the Pantry.  On bad days, it was the Crap-Dumping Room.




We really didn't know what this room wanted to be, and so we ignored it.  Until last summer, when my sister and her family came to visit.  Our little house has one guest room, but it's not fair to ask a teenager to sleep in the living room.




We sprang into action.   Robb popped out our antique sash windows, and got to work scraping paint.




We use a horribly corrosive paint remover on our windows, because we can't use a heat gun near our antique glass.  It's both incredibly terrifying and satisfying.  (I'm itching, just thinking about this stuff.)




Robb is a hero.  This was disgusting work.




We blocked off the pass-through into the kitchen to minimize the mess.

I shot this photo from inside our laundry room. At some point in the life of this house, a small room was added onto the back of our house for laundry.  That's why there's a window on what's now an interior wall.  It's a delightfully odd feature of our home.




And speaking of delightfully odd features, here's the cat door Robb built into the wall.  All of our cats are former ferals, and they just aren't interested in using litterboxes.  So they get free access to the outside.




We primed the walls with tinted primer.




This is a remarkably tiny room, and yet it took a lot of effort to restore.




In the spirit of restoration, rather than renovation, Robb and I did our best to match the original paint colors of our house.  I've written about this blue, when we were working on our kitchen.  It was apparently a very popular color for kitchens in the 1940s, which is when our stove and cabinets were installed.  We painted this room with the color we used on our cabinet doors, mostly because I intend to hang my idiot collection of antique cheese graters on the walls, and they looked better on the lighter blue.

What?  Doesn't everyone have a collection of vintage cheese graters? 




After the walls, I painted the trim.  We used the same color as the kitchen trim, to connect this room with the kitchen.




The kitties were pretty excited about the air mattress that I borrowed.




I stopped by the wonderful independent Discount Fabric store, and bought the perfect material for curtains.  I swear, this store is like the Room of Requirement in Hogwarts.  I always seem to find what I need, among the jumble.




Robb built a bedframe.  And Brent and Nestor gave us this glorious vintage clock.  It has functional neon, although the clock itself needs some work.




Seriously, how perfect are those curtains?  And how about the shelf Robb built, that hide our router and houses our home alarm?




Just enough room for a twin bed.




And when we don't have guests, I can use the room as a sewing space.  Robb has since built shelves for this room, but I don't have a good photo of them.

Overall, we're really pleased with the way this turned out.  At some point we're going to have to tackle the Pile of Denial, otherwise known as the laundry room.  But that's a project for another time.



Comments

Anonymous said…
There is no end to your talents (both of you). Love reading about your adventures and glad you're back! Rose in Ohio

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