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| I was clearly not organized enough to frame the photos the same way. |
To start with, the cabinet was full of little hooks in illogical places, all of them painted over about a million times. Kind of like everything else around here. I yanked them all out with pliers and ended up with this pile of yuck.
We bought some wood of the perfect width and even found a quart of the blue paint from the kitchen in the shed. I don't like the blue paint, but repainting the kitchen is for another day. The quart of paint, by the way, was $0.89 at K-Mart when purchased. I broke out my favorite little roller and painted the shelves.
Next I did what seemed logical at the time. I did some math to see where the shelves needed to go, I measured each shelf up from the bottom of the cabinet, and I drilled the 1/4" holes for the shelf supports.
Then I attempted to put the shelves in. First of all, they didn't fit because of the thickness of the brackets. Once we trimmed them to fit, they didn't sit flat. At all. Not even close enough to fake it. I thought I had just done an awful job drilling the holes, possibly cried about it (houses are stressful), then pulled out all of the supports and filled the holes with joint compound. Le sigh.
Okay, next idea! I tried making a jig out of some scrap 1x2. I thought if I made a little c-shaped thingy with the holes in it, I could level the jig and drill the holes through it. But then I couldn't even get the holes straight on the jig. Blarg.
New idea - just use the edge of the level to draw lines on the shelf. Actually drill pilot holes in an attempt to make the 1/4" holes more precise. Ah-ha! This is about when I made my big discovery: the shelf itself is completely out of square. I guess the house has survived an earthquake or two, and it's just plain wonky. I decided that my shelves would be level and the cabinet could do whatever it wanted to. I finally, after much painstaking pilot-hole drilling, managed to install reasonably flat and level shelves.
Then I went into the next room. Turns out I was a little over-zealous and drilled four of the holes clear through the wall. Oops. I guess I just love patching drywall SO MUCH that I wanted to make myself another little project.
Okay, less talking, more pictures.
Here are the shelves, finally installed! If you look closely, you can see that the shelves are not the same sort of level as the cabinet.
Then, chock full of spices! They are about 99% Penzeys, of course. I believe there are about 106 different spices, herbs, or spice blends in this photo. The sad thing is, that isn't even my entire collection.
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| These are refills for the things I have in jars. They live above the fridge. |
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| These live in the cabinets with the food. For these I don't have jars or the jars are too big for the spice rack. |
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| These are just mustard and mustard seed. I planned to give homemade mustard at Christmas and it didn't pan out. Maybe this year! |
Spices, ideally, should not be stored out in the open. The random assortment of paper towels, back-up spices, and little-used kitchen appliances we have above the fridge should also really not be stored out in the open! To solve both problems, I ordered some cute vintage fabric from Etsy and made curtains.
Of course, the little cheap slidey curtain rods don't come in 17" lengths for the skinny spice rack. (I was annoyed to later find 18", but I didn't find them the day I was shopping.) I bought the shortest one available at the time, which I think was 24". When we bought our drywall saw, it came in a little kit which is basically a handle that accepts sawzall blades. It has come in quite handy, even though the blade wobbles no matter what you do.
This was a pleasantly easy fix. I used a metal sawzall blade with lots of teeth and cut off both pieces of the curtain rod. It came with a little plastic cover, so you can't even see the less-than-perfect edges.
The vintage fabric was very narrow and only available in one 2-yard chunk, so I supplemented with wide orange hems.
At the end of it all, I'm quite pleased with the spice rack and the curtains. But man, why was that so difficult?
