Organizing the Homefront & Odd Chores

Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
Those days of soda and pretzels and beer
Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
Dust off the sun and moon and sing a song of cheer
                                               
                                             -Nat King Cole




Lazy days of summer? Are you kidding me? Anyone that has lived on a farm knows that summer is the time you got to "Make Hay While the Sun Shines"! My little oasis is no different.

Living in an old house there are chores that I don't think most people ever have to do. One of these chores is painting the inside of your cabinets. My kitchen was built somewhere around 1867-1930. When we bought the house, we were told that the bathroom and the kitchen were put in in the 1920's, but when we put down hardwood in the kitchen, we found a well underneath my stove that seem to point to an earlier time.

My kitchen cabinets were clearly built into the kitchen when it was being constructed as it follows the roofline of the kitchen. These crazy things are made out of 3/4" plywood? and when we first moved in, were in sorry shape. I don't know why but as some point, it must have been really fashionable to paint all your woodwork flat white and put on the handles with the spade shape that looks like someone had a Euchre fetish because I've seen these handles in so many old houses. Needless to say, we stripped those cabinet doors and I tole painted them with patterns from my favorite painters and we love it. I'll teach you how to tole paint in a future post as I truly believe anyone who can color in a coloring book can tole paint something they can be proud of.

Pattern created by my favorite painter, Catherine Holman. Painted by me!

This is what my cabinets look like now.

But the insides, especially the cabinet that houses my pots and pans are in a word: Sad.
These cabinets are dark, long and there are a lot of wasted space. They are finished only in paint so they get pretty banged up and end up looking like this atrocious mess after a few years:

SAD

So out with whatever paint I may have left over, I begin the project.

If I'm feeling particularly DYI, I'll buy some TSP and wash the inside of the cabinet down. I wasn't in this case so Pine sol worked. After cleaning and letting them dry, I literally have to crawl inside the cabinet to paint it. Clearly the last time I wasn't as ambious, as the original Pepto-Bismol pink was still in the back portion of the cabinet. After painting the entire thing and letting it dry, came the purging.

 

Can anyone explain how we get so many lids for so few pots and pans? And where did some of these pots and pans come from? Maybe that lost space in the back is being use for by those pots and pans for more lascivious actions? Yikes.

So, after a few hours of work, I can now enjoy the next couple of years with a nice, freshly painted cabinet and only the pots and pans I use. And I can now shut the door to this cabinet! Bonus!