A Wood-Filled Weekend

With a sequence of events, we need to clear our some more space in our garage. One of the main things that needs to go is a bunch of wood we've saved up over the years from various projects. Before just getting rid of all of it or giving it away, I thought we should try and finish some of our own projects which have been on our to-do lists for years and years now. We accomplished both of these projects this past weekend:

1. A "box" to cover the vent hood pipe that goes into the ceiling in our kitchen. 

In April of 2021, we made the decision to vent our range hood vent outside instead of having a recirculating one. It was one of the better decisions we've ever made for our house because I love it so much. I can cook and vent the smells outside and you can't smell anything after a few hours. I don't regret anything about the project except the person we hired. For the last 1.5 years, we've been staring at a really ugly ceiling patch where the pipe connected into the attic. The pipe is also not centered, but that is secondary to the ugly ceiling.

My husband has mentioned wanting to build a box around it to hide the pipe from the beginning to fix both problems. We were finally able to use some leftover MDF board from previous projects to build a three-sided "box" to place in front of the pipe on top of our cabinets. I had used play-doh a long time ago to trace the edge of the trim against our ceiling so we could cut the appropriate edge to cover there as well. 

After a few coats of paint and primer, we had ourselves a white cabinet box to make our kitchen range hood look centered and neat. 

We will hopefully add some trim around the top of the box to match the traditional style of our kitchen as right now it looks too clean and modern. But for now, this box fixed our main issues. Total cost* of this project: $0

2. Utilizing the other half of our second blind corner cabinet.

For my birthday in 2020, I bought blind corner shelf pull-outs and had them installed. To this day I still love using them and they have been super helpful. We have one other blind corner cabinet but the same pull-outs would not work in the other cabinet because it was a smaller cabinet. 

However, this cabinet had space behind it we could use.

The open cabinet is the one with the blind corner.
We've never been able to fully utilize that space. 

This is the backside of the cabinet which allows us to
make a cut to use the blind corner.

We had talked about cutting a hole from behind and adding another door to create another cabinet in our kitchen essentially. This project never came to fruition because I wasn't convinced we had a way to cut open the cabinet to make a clean rectangular opening. This past weekend on Friday morning, I asked my husband again if we could do this project. I was also more convinced to want to do it as a way to use up some of the wood we had stored before we got rid of it all. 

By Friday evening, after the kids went to bed, we got right to work. It took us the entire evening to get the hole measured, prepped, and cut, but we did it.

Really clean cut with a multi-tool he purchased last year.
I have no problem with spending money when it can earn its value.

The next day, my husband spent the whole afternoon making drawer boxes for me. That evening, we had one installed with the sliding tracks. It took much more time than we anticipated because the drawer slides were nearly impossible to separate. We looked up Youtube Videos from different people with three different methods on how to remove them. After a lot of pulling, tugging, and frustrated grunts, we were able to separate the slides and have them installed on their respective halves. 

On Sunday afternoon, my husband finished making the cabinet door completely from scratch! We used an old piece of plywood originally from the house we had saved from a previous renovation. We added some trim to fit with the style of the rest of our house. I primed and painted Sunday evening and by Monday morning, everything was installed and complete. 

Comparable pull out shelves like this would cost $100+ each...(yes, we've looked into it.)

Yes, I've already filled them up. Will need to reorganize the
pantry now that I have more space. 

The secret passageway has a proper entrance! 

Total cost* of this project: $30.90 

I'm really pleased with the way this project turned out. I know we waited years before turning this cabinet into a reality, but now that it's completed, it's really exciting to add another 4 cubic feet of storage space!

*Cost refers to new dollars spent. All other materials we had leftover from previous projects.

Shelf Cooking Part 2

If you missed my first week of shelf cooking, check out the post here.

My second week of shelf cooking did not go nearly as well as the first week. We started off the week with chicken tikka masala which my husband and I enjoyed. The kids had some random fried rice here and there and I cooked a pork dish. We did a meal of frozen dumplings and Costco pizza. We also had leftovers to finish from when my husband's parents came to visit. So week two was more of survival mode and eating whatever we could. 

This is an older photo from a previous time I made chicken tikka masala.
When you're shelf cooking you have to forego the scallions and cilantro.

By Thursday and Friday, I had done some grocery shopping again so I could cook some more dishes. On Friday, I was also bringing friends a meal for their meal train so I made a double batch of everything so we would eat the other half at home. Great way to motivate you into grocery shopping and cooking: cook for someone else! 

We ended the week with sushi since I was going to be in the area of our favorite sushi restaurant during dinner time. I placed an order over the phone and picked it up on my way home. 

Let me be honest. Shelf cooking the first week was fun. It was exciting and "cool" to be cooking from things we had at home. It felt like the most efficient way to be lazy. The second week? Not so much. If you ever shelf cook, don't do it two weeks in a row, and don't do it for longer than a week. 

We're slowly returning back to a normal routine of grocery shopping and meal prepping again, but shelf cooking for two weeks was an eye-opening experience.

Shelf Cooking

Last week, we had a friend over for lunch on Sunday and we ended up talking for the entire afternoon. We really enjoyed our time with our friend, but unfortunately, it meant I lost my day to do my weekly cooking preparation. 

I was too lazy to go grocery shopping after that so we ate an entire week of meals planned through shelf cooking. Shelf cooking is defined by cooking with ingredients you already have. For me, that means using frozen meats, frozen vegetables, canned vegetables, or refrigerator staples. I did go to the grocery store during the week to pick up some staples such as milk, eggs, and bread, but I actually didn't buy any other fresh vegetables to cook the dishes we ate throughout the week because I didn't need any.

The first week of shelf cooking, I made:

1. Pesto: dry pasta, pre-made pesto I make myself and save in jars in the fridge, olive oil, canned chicken (optional)

2. Chili: dry beans, canned tomatoes, onion, frozen ground beef, spices

3. Seafood omlettes: eggs, frozen mussels, frozen shrimp, spices

4. Asian vermicelli (very similar to 蚂蚁上树): mung bean noodles, frozen peas, frozen ground pork, eggs, frozen shrimp, sauces and seasoning

5. DIY lunchables: pepperoni, cheese cubes, crackers

6. Homemade pizza: pizza dough yeast, pepperoni, shredded cheese, spaghetti sauce, Italian seasoning

This was my first time doing a full week of shelf cooking and it turned out great! This is a far cry from what you typically think of as last-minute meals: PBJ, instant noodles, canned soup. We did have an occasional meal here and there with supplemented frozen food such as frozen dumplings or frozen Cane's chicken (we buy a tailgate, freeze it, and reheat in 6-8 pieces at a time for a meal. They're delicious reheated when you reheat them properly!) But our shelf cooking week was quite successful. 

This is mainly possible due to keeping certain things on hand at all times. 

In the pantry, this includes things like pasta, pasta sauce, canned tomatoes, dry beans, and dry Asian noodles. In the refrigerator, I stock items like cheese, pepperoni, or eggs. For the freezer, this includes almost anything: frozen meats, frozen seafood, frozen vegetables, I even keep frozen butter and sometimes frozen bread. Covid taught me a lot about how to freeze foods to save for later. 

There were a few fresher staples I used which included onions and potatoes. These are fresh vegetables which have a longer shelf life when stored properly. So this allowed me to use them in the dishes I mentioned above without having bought them specifically for this week's menu. I even made homemade French fries in the oven to go with our frozen Cane's!

If you've never tried shelf cooking before, or never shelf cooked for this long, I hope reading about my menu for the week has inspired you to be more creative even on weeks when you don't grocery shop :) 

Stay tuned, we're having another partial shelf cooking week! I'll be sharing how we did it a second week in a row while still cooking a variety of food! 

Storage 101: The Pantry

This is part 2 of my Storage 101 series. If you missed part 1, you can catch up here.

Disclosure: I'm not about the beautiful Instagram-worthy photos. I'm about real life and telling it/showing it like it is. Take it or leave it. 

There's a house one street over from our house which we put an offer on when we were buying houses. At the time, I really wanted that house for two main reasons: 

1. It had a walk-in pantry.
2. It had a utility room sink.

Not having a utility room sink doesn't affect me much after all. Washing paint brushes in a bathroom sink isn't ideal, but at the end of the day, having running water in a basin is pretty much all the same. Not having a walk-in pantry on the other hand has often made me sigh.

Our pantry, although not a walk-in, has space. It's two sets of cabinets, one on top of the other. In total, we have less than 40 cubic ft of space. After having kids, our pantry was starting to look disheveled with all the snacks and cereal boxes piling up on top of each other.

This was our pantry before I went through and redid it.

By no means is this on the extreme messy spectrum. However, it could have been much better.

One problem we've always had is not being able to see things in the back of the pantry. The space itself is quite deep which is a good and bad thing. Good: it can store a decent amount of stuff. Bad: you can't see it all. Unfortunately, the solution is to not use about 9 cubic feet in order to maintain visibility throughout the space. So if you do the math, that only leaves approximately 30 cubic feet of usable pantry space. That's a little larger than the size of an average refrigerator in 2021. 

I took my storage inspiration from The Home Edit and used clear storage bins to organize our pantry. We bought wide and narrow containers and mixed and matched as needed. It just happened to work where two rows of shelving were the same height as the bins so we could maximize the space.

I had a lot of fun unpacking our entire pantry and rearranging/reorganizing the space. I also followed the rules where most used items are accessible at lower parts of the pantry and/or kept in the front of the space. I tried to move as much of the unused items to the top of the pantry and in the back of the shelves. To be honest, we just need to get rid of more things, but I can't bring myself to yet and we can still afford to store it without creating a mess. Taking from Marie Kondo here in not having to trash everything but simply keeping them stored well. 

Simply more joyful to look at.

After organizing the top half of our pantry, I decided to tackle the bottom half as well. This space is where we store larger pantry items as well as the "value size" refills for various items: cooking oil, rice, bulk cereal, etc. 

A big part of utilizing the space well was removing our paper towels. I'm not going to lie. We had over 12 rolls of paper towels stored under there. When we were a married couple without kids, this worked okay. Now with two kids and a lot of snacks, we needed the space. 

One afternoon, we spontaneously came up with the idea to reuse an old organizer I bought while in college and hang it in the garage to store lightweight paper items, ie: bulk paper towels.

I covered up one of my garage masterpieces, but I'm okay with that.
And no, we did not hoard paper towels. I bought one bulk pack back in 2019.
In February of 2020, I used a free coupon to get another bulk pack because
that's when the coupon was expiring. We use paper towels really slowly.
None of this was related to Covid.

This freed up SO much space. 

As far as organization, I knew I wanted to keep half of the space tall to store our 50 lb bag of rice* and stackable boxed goods. The other half, I wanted some shelving to store round jars and other shaped containers. Originally, I reused old diaper boxes turned on their side to create grid boxes so I could map out what kind of shelving I wanted. This worked out so well I ended up keeping them permanently. Diaper boxes are really sturdy. 

Our lower pantry. 

*Fun fact: Between my husband, my daughter, and myself, we ate over 100 pounds of rice in 2020. 

The storage bins for our pantry reorganization did cost quite a bit, but everything has a designated bin and it has stayed relatively organized. Even three months after our initial cleaning and reorganizing, everything has generally stayed neat and tidy.

We even replaced the batteries in our puck lights so we can see into it at night!

This is how our pantry looks like 3 months after the initial reorganization.
Everything has generally been maintained. No, this is not a staged photo.
It was taken one morning before the kids woke up on a whim.

Maintenance is a key aspect of organization which often gets overlooked. Sure, it may look prim, proper, and clean upon its initial organization, but the true test is whether or not you can maintain it. Our pantry? Yeah, it's definitely been maintained which proves two things:

1. The organization system works.

2. Everything actually has a place.

Next time: Drawer Tetris