What's behind door number 1?

You might have noticed the door by our cooker in the pictures in my last post.

That is the door to our larder. I didn't want to have too many cabinets in the new kitchen (although I wound up with upper cabinets, which I hadn't wanted, but found I needed), so Mr SLS had the fantastic idea of tacking on a bit at the corner of the room to act as our larder. Once the building work had finished, we threw in some IKEA shelves and the room became the dumping ground for food, drink, kids art supplies, play doh. You name it, it went in there. The shelves were quite deep and I could never find anything. Inspired by a friend's larder (Janice, that is you if you are reading!!), I decided we needed to refit the whole thing, as it wasn't working for me. When we cleared it out I found 4 half full bags of self raising flour, 3 half used bags of rice, a rather petrified banana at the back, you get the idea ...

Here is the larder before

OMG what a hideous mess. The space behind the bigger shelf on the left was total dead space and the kids 'stuff' had infiltrated in an attempt to keep the kitchen clear of clutter. I used to spend ages looking for things that I needed while cooking.

So I spent ages trying to convince Mr SLS that we needed to do a 'refit'. He didn't really see the need to revamp it, but I was determined. So back to my old friend Ikea, to stock up on Billy bookshelves as that is what Janice had used (I am such a copy cat!). I loved the way the food looked against the black, so I had to have them. We moved the old shelves into the shed where they now hold tins of paint/decorating supplies (this was key in convincing Mr SLS).

Ahhh, lovely clear empty space!!!!

Sadly it meant that the kitchen was a disaster zone...

This was the point of thinking, 'Oh, why did we start this.....' we actually went to bed on the Saturday night leaving the kitchen like this. It was very depressing to come down to it on Sunday morning.

But once we got the Billy bookcases in, I got to get to organising, decanting and making it usable and workable. Here is the final result:

Behind the door my spices have a lovely little home of their own...

Ahhhh, that is better. Now I can find the flour (I have since labelled the jars so I know the self raising from the plain after some rather flat scones!).

I still have what seems like a never ending amount of areas like this in my home that need a good sort out, but at least I find this area much easier to keep tidy and organised!