In addition to a bunch of work-related stuff, I’m trying to devote some time during my sabbatical to fixing various problems that have piled up around Chateau Steelypips over the last few years when I was too busy to deal with much of anything. Thus, today’s photo is this fairly unremarkable shot:
This exists mostly to document my recent reorganizing of a bunch of stuff in the kitchen. These cabinets above the stove are somewhat awkwardly located, and serve to hold spices and other cooking stuff. They’re a little too deep to be ideal for that, though, and as a result I’ve spent a lot of time leaning over hot burners rummaging through dozens of bottles of stuff trying to find the basil (or whatever).
Thus, this little bit of improvisation: these are wire bins from Target attached to the inside of the cabinet doors using screw eyes and cable ties, which isn’t especially aesthetic, but does vastly increase the effective “front row” of the cabinets (and approximately doubles what Kate can reach without a stepstool…). Which hopefully will make it easier to keep the stuff I actually use regularly in a place where I can find it quickly.
(Really, we need to do a large renovation of the entire kitchen, because the cabinets in there were never all that nice to begin with, and are getting pretty beat. That’s going to cost a lot of money, though, so we’re putting it off as long as possible. Which is why I’m bodging this together from $20 worth of bits from Target…)
ISTR you mentioning that your house was built in the early 1970s. If I’ve remembered that right, and those are the original cabinets, then you’ve had 40+ years of use out of those cabinets, which isn’t too shabby.
I replaced my (AFAIK) original cabinets when my house was about 40 years old. There was a cabinet I couldn’t use at all: four doors wide, shelves supported only at the ends. Said shelves were visibly bowed under their own weight. It was a full kitchen renovation (plus a powder room), which set me back more than $30k, and that was with Corian rather than granite for countertops. So I can understand your wanting to put this off. But if you’re planning to sell in the near future, there is a good chance you will get most of your renovation money back in the form of a higher sale price. That’s only true for kitchens and bathrooms though; anything else is a money sink.
The house dates back to the 40’s, the cabinets are cheap particle-board things of much more recent vintage. They weren’t all that old when we got the house in 2003. There was awful wallpaper in there, and some hideous 70’s-era avocado-green paint, though.