Ceiling Racks a Great Space Saver in a Small Home
Today, Jakob Barry guest posts about how ceiling racks can help save space in a small kitchen:
When the house I grew up in was going to be sold, I was one of the lucky ones who got to clean it out. Among the things that were given to me were a bunch of good quality pots and pans, the kind made to last a lifetime. In a way they already had lasted a good forty years, so I’ll call it two lifetimes!
After packing and shipping my new belongings, the boxes arrived and sat around in my living room for a while till I could figure out what to do with them. It wasn’t that there were so many, but my kitchen in the small home I was living in couldn’t handle the overload.
I probably could have stuffed a few here and there but I generally like to have the abode in reasonable shape, which means as little clutter and extra tchotchkes lying around as possible.
I searched for all kinds of solutions until a friend suggested I was overlooking the obvious to ease my predicament: a kitchen ceiling rack.
The Dogs of Campbell Town Part Deux
Dexter with Molly in the background
Our dogs at Our Little House are an important part of our lives. No decision is made that doesn't also affect or take them into account.
Since our pack has changed somewhat since I introduced you to them, I thought it time for a reintroduction.
Our once Fearsome Four has evolved into a Stunning Six. If we thought it was crowded in Our Little House before, now it’s positively cramped. It’s a nice, comfortable sort of cramped, though, with just the right amount of space for everybody and everydog.
The Stuff that Makes our Family History
Oil to Electric Converted Lamp
When I wrote the post, “The Stages of Eliminating Stuff,” I wrote about letting go of the sentimentality of some of the stuff we had, which was my mother’s. She and my father used to antique quite a bit and I had some very large pieces.
Obviously, we don’t have room for a lot of big furniture. I knew what she loved most and I loved most of the same pieces and resolved to find a use and space for them.
One of our Living Large community, Martin, made some good points in a comment: “I have antiques from Great Aunts/Grandparents/parents who worked hard to buy them–they came (from) Ireland with nothing and from what you are working to go to as a life style. I would find it is disrespectful to dump these things-they are more than sentiment–they are family history. With that said-there are so many other things I realize I can and will part with, but not the family history!!”
His comment first made me doubt whether I should be eliminating any of these things from our lives and also wonder if there are different sets of rules for items considered to be family history, rather than just stuff, or even stuff with sentimentality attached.
Appreciating Each Day
There’s nothing to remind us of how fragile our lives are like losing someone we know, particularly when that person is only 39-years-old. Our friend’s daughter passed away at the end of last week. She was young and of course, it was very unexpected.
When we first moved to Our Little House, one of my goals was to regularly do something we had never tried before or see places we had never been.
We’ve tried a lot of stuff. Bowling, which I had done regularly when I was younger, was something I got Dale to try. We’ve also went canoeing, which I didn’t like because I couldn’t quite get the balance thing, but it was ok. and I'm glad I tried it.
