A pantry wasn’t a “must” on my requirement list for the house, but I just love a pantry. All of your canned and dried goods in one place. Where’s my pasta? Oh, there it is. And most homes that D & I toured were pretty stingy with storage space. The brick baby may have the most storage capability of any of the homes we looked at.
It may not be the awesome HouseofSmith Pantry
nor the ginormous larder at the Pioneer Woman's house,
but I'm glad to have one, so I shouldn't complain too much about the pantry.
Oh, I could though. After all, it’s slightly less than user-friendly. But it has character, and it is functional, and those two characteristics are key. It’ll be a challenge to shape things up to our needs. Mostly because, uh, you have to kinda climb into it with a ladder, like an attic.
The entire pantry is quite difficult to capture because once your body is inside, you turn left at the wall that lines up with the left side of the doorframe, and then there is another giant step upward again. But the ceiling is not so tall that you can stand straight up inside of it, so it's not a room. It's quite uncomfy unless you were very short. I had quite an imaginative few moments in there (read on), and pictured Blackbeard's dead wives or naughty children being closeted in here like in an old pulp novel with a cheesy cover, perhaps a girl afright with mouth agape, eyes shut, and useless tiger claw hands splayed stupidly in front of her, with a a big spooky tree in the background. Or a dark scene with a lone woman in a white nightdress. I'm just saying. This is what I meant by character, this thing is gothic.
Anyway, I was given to ponder how in the world I will organize this thing to be serviceable to our needs. And that perhaps I should consider on which shelf the Cask of Amontillado should be stored. and I remembered something from my time in Japan. The under-floor storage compartment that they have in kitchens. Like this. Or this. The food attic is nearly opposite to this. Of course, you have to have your entire body inside the food attic in order to reach, well, anything actually inside it. Hence the ladder.
So back to the food attic. It was icky and dingy. There were multicolored stains that resisted watered bleach and soap, and the whole thing was an unfortunate smoggy yellow. So I crawled inside and painted it a glossy white, all the while craning my neck to one side and then the other, and huddling over like Quasimodo. You know those warnings on the paint cans that say use in a well ventilated area? I think I killed off a few brain cells in my first bout with the food attic, perhaps why I got it in my head that it would be a good idea if I wrote a book called The Children of the Cupboard (see above). But I got out and then climbed back in, andthen got out and got back in and brought the box fan onto the ledge that you stand on. This allowed me to breathe a bit easier, but it was even more difficult to maneuver and I still got a headache (and I probably lost a few IQ points). I think I'm just going to try various configurations of pantry organization as we bring over our belongings one van-ful at a time.
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