#Pantry

Will update: Will arrived in Tübingen safely and then travelled to Utrecht to present a paper that went really well! He’s now back in Tübingen getting settled. Thank you all for your prayers and sweet texts!

Remember that time I was desperate for more shelving in my pantry and stuffed a bookcase in it?

It was an odd fix but a fix nonetheless.

Well, our landlord was over the other weekend and gave us her blessing on upgrading the pantry with shelves and drawers! So, now I’ve been pouring myself into Pinterest trying to get ideas for shelving in the pantry and here are a few of them I really like.

I’m really liking wrap-around shelving (but in an “L” shape for our pantry), incorporating a lazy susan in the corners, as well as having drawers.

Now, being on a student budget means that it’s gonna take some research and time to get this done. Do any of you savvy DIYers have any ideas or tips? Your wisdom and knowledge is much appreciated!

The Nook

While we were working on the pantry we also had the nook to deal with. Here’s what it looked like before.

And here’s what it looks like now!

And we have a little office area where the bookcase used to be.

Isn’t that desk adorable!?! £30 at a charity shop. Win!
Now, did we immediately come to this conclusion? No, we tried a few different options. Here they are.

Do you guys think we made the right decision?
The nook feels so cozy now and the desk is a wonderful addition. We’ve already made use of it several times.
We’d like to hang up some art/pictures and add a little end table as well as a foot stool in the nook area and have a “command centre” type thing by the desk. I’d also love to spray paint the chair I have there red but I don’t really have the space or the good weather to do that. We might end up returning the chair we already have to a charity shop and look for a different chair. Or we might not. We’ll wee.
So, what do you think so far?

Bookcase Meets Pantry

This holiday season we made a lot of changes to our kitchen and among those changes was the pantry. You may have noticed in my post about the kitchen that the pantry was looking a little, well, disheveled and inefficient.

Will and I have been trying to come up with a plan of adding more storage without having to nail a shelf up to the wall and we came up with looking for a bookcase that would fit in the space. Welp, we found just that! Hello book case!

After a good cleaning we took a step back to see if they were a good fit together. What do you think?

Not bad, eh? The bookcase is about half as deep as the shelves but it all works.

The bottom is a lot of back-up-type stuff like sugar, rice, salt, and oil. We also keep our pasta  and our plastic bags down there too.

The Middle is where I have all of my baking stuff and jars of lentils, orzo, cous cous, etc.

Up top I put jars and cans and condiment/snack stuff. I feel like, typically these things should all go in the middle but I bake more than cook so I feel a bit justified in the arrangement I have now; though it’s subject to change. Depending on my mood. Oh, and on the upper-most shelf I put our first-aid kit, our candles, and our Christmas stuff: the stuff we don’t need very often at all.

Oh, and remember when I was trying to figure out labels for my jars? Well, I figured that I liked the typewriter labels so much more than the chalkboard ones that I decided to try it out. Ta daaa!

It’s much cleaner don’t you think? And the pantry too. Here’s a before…

… and now the after.

Such an upgrade!

Pantry. Done.