A lot has been going on outside while I have been stuck inside for the last 9 days painting and organizing our kitchen.
Everything is getting so pretty outdoors, blooms and buds...
Including the blueberries BUT... Now they are saying expect a frost :( and there is no way I can cover all these beautiful blooms. I can only hope for the best.
Elizabeth is saying come this way....
So I have spent the last week on ladders, removing cabinet doors, putting on cabinet doors, removing cabinet doors, putting on cabinet doors. Yes there was a problem! I painted the kitchen 4 different colors of yellow before I got it right. The first yellow looked anemic, the second looked like Donald duck yellow, so I mixed the two together so I did not have to purchase anymore paint and painted them the third time.
I decided that even though that picture I found on the internet of that lovely yellow kitchen with yellow walls and yellow cabinets was beautiful it was not going to happen in our kitchen. So I left the the freshly painted yellow walls I repainted all the cabinets once again white!
I have not made curtains because all I have been doing is painting, the top of that molding above the upper cabinets is way up there for one short older person that happens to have Meniere's disease and many other elderly issues. So this slowed me down a bit but I am very happy with our new brighter kitchen and it is clean!
"Windsor", our 1920s icebox was moved to the kitchen. There was a L shaped bar in the area where Windsor sits now. We had to patch the floor tile for a temporary fix and put a rug over it for now. We have been planning to put in a new floor so I am happy that we waited.
I still have to put another coat of paint on the two chairs at the breakfast table and paint the table legs white then that will be finished.
I finally found a place for our vintage clock that lights up at night. It is electric so I had a hard time finding a place where the plug cord would not look so out of place.
Things were a terrible mess and laundry kept pilling up...
I also painted the canisters three times.. They did not stay yellow because it just didn't look right...
So for now they are green and white and whenever I can get an idea of a vintage design I will paint some vintage art work on them. For now they can just stay green and white. I painted the lids green because the other side of the kitchen den area is vintage green walls and it pulls a bit of that color into the kitchen.
Cooking was quite difficult so we ate a lot of cheerios and bananas and smoothies.
We had to do the unthinkable and purchase take out a few times. We eat most of our meals at home and our stomachs are not used to take out food anymore so we really don't feel well after we eat take out food.
We once had a large freezer in our storage room and a large side by side refrigerator/freezer. When we started downsizing and removing clutter from our house and being more frugal and energy wise we got rid of our large freezer, gave away our side by side refrigerator, purchased a very small chest freezer and a 1920s non electric ice box we named Windsor.
I am happy to have Windsor officially in the kitchen now. :) Windsor was sitting against a wall in the laundry area.
Some of you ask me about Windsor and how it is going using a 1920s icebox. Well it became quite difficult because ice is no longer delivered nor do they sell large cubes of ice to fit inside the ice chamber. We tried many ways of freezing blocks of ice, frozen water bottles and such but it was just not working. Finally we purchased a small dorm size refrigerator.
We do keep food in Windsor but it is the food we "can" ourselves. There is canned chicken and beef, beans, vegetables and fruit on the shelves in Windsor. Also canned food that I have dehydrated. So Windsor is being used.
Living with a tiny dorm size refrigerator is quite interesting. We have to be very careful with our grocery purchases. The fridge was sitting under the bar in the kitchen, the one we just removed, and it was getting very difficult for me to reach down to get something out of the fridge and would have to get on my knees quite often so I asked Charles if we could move it to sit on top of something so we could get food out easier.
So we now have it sitting up on a small wooden table and it is so much better. I feel like we have a new fridge.
This past week someone gave us some fresh eggs since their chickens were laying a lot lately and this causes quite a situation for our small fridge and our diet since we eat very few eggs. So what I am going to do is use up the eggs making cake. We do not eat a lot of sugar or desserts but we do eat them occasionally. So I will use up the eggs in the cakes and slice the cakes and individually wrap generous slices and put it in the freezer. I try and keep frozen cake in the freezer because frozen cake is quite good this way. If someone stops by we can offer them a dessert and coffee or tea or have a dessert when we do want some. This way we don't have to eat it all up at once to keep it from going dry.
We will need to purchase some fresh fruits and vegetables in a few days and right now this is how I wrap our veggies for the small fridge.
I take it out of the plastic bag and divide it into an average serving size for us and put it on top of a cloth then tie it closed. I wish we could purchase carrots without plastic bags.
Like this...
Celery the same way. However, I am in the process of making vegetable cloth wrap/bags and embroidering on them what is inside such as carrots, celery, cabbage etc. I will take pictures of them when I am finished.
We keep the fresh vegetables in the bottom of the fridge and the cloth seems to help to keep it crisp longer. I started purchasing maple syrup in glass bottles but we need to use up what is in the plastic container first.
I normally remove the food from packages and put it in containers to make it fit better in the fridge. The jar in the back with the white lid is bacon. I remove each slice and layer it in the jar then when I take it out I just remove what I want to use and it is easy to get out and I don't have to fiddle with a package. We don't eat a lot of meat anymore, we mostly eat chicken when we do eat meat but Charles likes to have bacon every once in a while.
We are always learning and as we keep changing, making our home more organized, living more like the past, eating less processed foods and carefully choosing the foods we do eat, trying to be more sustainable by growing fruits and vegetables, keeping track of our money by journaling what we spend and the electricity and water we use we feel more empowered and have a stronger desire to learn and do even more.
We started with a very cluttered home and life and we are finding our way out of the cluttered and wasteful life step by step by resembling more like our generations before us. This is something you can do too if you find yourself with too much clutter and debt.
Grandma Donna
