A Pantry Re-do

I love my pantry. It was one of the things I was really excited about when we first bought this house. It's not large, but you can walk into it, there's shelves all around and a cute little window.

I painted the shelves when we first moved in, put up a few more, and have slowly been building my glass jar collection by buying bits here and there when I find them cheap. No plastic containers are allowed in my pantry. Since I'm lucky enough to have one, I want it to look beautiful too!

Now I do my grocery shopping once a month (I plan a month's worth of meals and work out exactly what I need to make them) and before I do it, and when the shelves are kinda empty, I like to give them a wipe down. Now this month, we were running out of EVERYTHING, so not just the shelves were empty but my jars too.

(No teabags left...I don't know how I survived the week.)

So what started out as a shelf wiping, turned into a let's empty the scraps out, wash the dust and gunk off the jars and hey, while we're at it, let's give them new labels too. I printed some labels with a cute border onto a sticker sheet and wrote the names on them.

While I was at it, I got this old basket,

and this old tin (that were alright when I was into primitive decorating,)

and gave them a blast of my new favourite powder-blue spraypaint.

The results really brightened up the darkness of the pantry.

(The colour is a bit intense in these photos.)

So it may not be much, but my pantry is now sparkling clean, and super-dooper organised and I love stepping into it and seeing all my jars filled up.

I love baking so I've got everything you could possibly need.

It makes me feel so rich and lucky, that come-what-may, we have enough food to last the month. Also, thanks to my new extra little freezer, I've been really, really organized and bought all my month's worth of meat (that we could NEVER have fit in our normal tiny freezer), cut it up, packed it and labelled it with the meal it's for. Couple that with the week's worth of bread that I bought cheap 'cos it was close to closing time, the well of abundance feels like it's overflowing.

And speaking of painting and brightening up, I have two of these flour sieves (from the primitive phase) that I was considering tossing as now they just look dingy.

But I dry brushed one with red for a bit of colour and I quite like the results. I think it'll look great at Christmas time with a green wreath. I might paint the other one white.

P.S. Stay tuned tomorrow for I plan to do my first give-away.

A quick stool makeover

I thought of making a silly toilet-humour joke to tie in with that heading...but thought, musn't, I can act juvenile at home but not out in public. Good breeding and all that.

Anyway, I always look in the furniture section at my local St Vinnies but come away discouraged as everything is too hopelessly vile or else they've taken to redoing the pieces themselves (NOT in my style) and charging a pretty penny for the end result. I wanted something small that I could easily smuggle home and hide from Mitch (I know we don't need more crap in our house), cheap so it doesn't matter it I mess it up and simple to redo as I have a short attention span.And it has to have definite potential. So when I saw this stool for $2 my eyes lit up.

It was gross. Rusting brass finish, plastic ends on the legs and a blue fluffy cover that was so disgusting that after removing I had to de-germ my hands immediately.

But after a light sanding, some powder blue spraypaint and some pretty new material, I was rather pleased with the result.

I'm not totally satisfied with the fabric, (actually some toile and black spraypaint could've looked rather sophisticated) but that's easily changed if I find a better replacement.

I love the blue spraypaint. Usually I would go for white, but I've been thinking about painting our fridge blue, so thought I would give this paint a go. I think I'm onto a winner.

P.S. I just realised it's been a year since I started blogging so I'm due for my first giveaway. So stay tuned, I'll be having one in the next week, as soon as I can work out what to give away. Any suggestions???