Most people will remember this past Saturday as the day Harry married Meghan. For Dave and me, it will be fondly remembered as the day we finally fixed up the pantry.
Like most homeowners, Dave and I try our best to keep our home in good repair. As a testament to that fact, we have a garage full of stuff we’ve purchased at Lowe’s intended to replace, repair or spruce up those little things around the house that are in need of attention. The challenge is that we have more good intentions than free time to tackle them; that and sometimes we just feel a bit lazy. Last Saturday, the planets seemed to line up favorably and we were able to check one item off our list; a spruce up of our kitchen pantry.
The pantry had a couple of issues that needed to be corrected. The most annoying of these was the fact that when the wire shelving was installed, the brackets were placed too close to each. This caused a problem when items on each shelf weren’t placed with the heaviest in the middle. Incorrect positioning of items resulted in the occasional see-saw, causing everything on the shelf to shift to the lowest point. And, as I prefer to arrange my pantry items by functionality rather than like baggage on a small plane, this was not a good thing. So, we resolved to install a third rail with brackets to carry the weight more efficiently.
We’d had one false start on this project weeks ago when we purchased what we thought we needed but discovered the rails we’d gotten were too long and had to be returned. So, before we could begin, Dave needed to head to Lowe’s to purchase the correct rail. While he was gone, I worked on packing the contents the pantry into shopping bags.
Once the shelves were emptied and removed, it was obvious that the walls were going to need to be painted. Aside for the fact that it was clear that it hadn’t been painted since the builder left the work site, the walls were marked with hundreds of colored lines that must have resulted from twelve years of containers and boxes scraping along the drywall.
After returning with the correct rail, Dave dug out the can of paint we had left over from our hall spruce-up project last summer and then began to measure out the placement of the bracket rails. There was one problem. The new rail sat about a quarter of an inch further out from the wall than the original rails. Ouch. It wasn’t going to work.
So, Dave headed back to Lowe’s to buy two more rails and after giving the walls a good scrubbing, I opened the paint can to begin cutting in around the woodwork. As I looked into the can I was worried that there wasn’t going to be enough paint to do the job. And, as I began to work around the baseboards, I was pretty sure that I we were going to have a problem. The thing was, Dave had already been gone a while and it was probably too late to give him a call to pick up some more paint.
When he returned, I shared my concerns and suggested we look through the many other cans of paint in the garage to see if we had anything else that would work. The last thing I wanted to do was send him back to Lowe’s.
As a possibility I suggested we check out a box tucked away in the back corner of the workbench that contained about a dozen sample bottles of paint that we’d picked up over the years when we were selecting colors for other rooms. They were pretty much all “off-while” with hints of color. Some had grey-green tones, some had blue tones and others were more buff. None were exactly the same as what I’d started the project with but since we had a small space to cover and weren’t concerned about matching anything, we decided we would choose one of them to mix with what we had. So we did. We dumped it in and gave it a good stir. It looked good. But it still didn’t look like enough paint.
So we dumped in another and stirred. The color didn’t seem to alter significantly and there were so many sample pots left that we eventually ended up adding about five or six more. And after a good stir, it really looked like the color I’d started with, with the added bonus that we now had more than enough paint to complete our project.
Finally we were ready to get going and in a couple of hours our pantry was a lovely shade of “wauff” white. (On our trip to the UK, we learned “wauff” is the way Waugh is pronounced in Scotland where Dave’s family originated.)
Yesterday we put the shelves back up and I carefully placed our foodstuffs by their function, not be their weight. It felt good to finally check this project off the “to do” list and so satisfying to know that we were able to use up some of the odd stuff in the garage in the process. I don’t know when our next project day will be, there are still many nagging little things to be done. But when that day comes, I am confident that we have at least most of what we need to complete the project stored in our garage.
- As a footnote, I wanted to add that we didn’t begin our project until after the royal nuptials were over. My priorities were in good order!