The kids may riot soon if we force them to eat any more zucchini! To be quite honest Jon and I are getting a bit tired of it too and I love fried zucchini! It blows my mind how much produce can come from 8 plants. So, now we are going to take a little break from the eating of the fresh zucchini and just freeze it.
Which brings us to our next dilemma. Where to put all of this frozen bounty? We decided that we needed a pantry, but where?
Our house is about 1700 Sq Ft with an ooober tiny kitchen. There is a 2 person maximum occupancy in the kitchen. The house is not huge, but modest size. The kitchen is just bizarrely small compared to the rest of our home. There is little overhead or lower cabinet space. The ones we have are tiny. You can’t fit anything bigger than a small cereal box in any of them (except under the sink and that’s just a weird place to store cereal). I distinctly remember about 13 years ago looking at the house to buy thinking to myself, “The kitchen is small, but I don’t like to cook anyway so no big deal”.
What the heck was I thinking?!? Everyone always gravitates to the kitchen. And have I mentioned how large my family is? Even if I didn’t like cooking, gees that was stupid!
We have a spare bedroom that we use as an office with computers and such. The room has a 10 x 6 walk in closet that has coats, winter clothes, and everything else you just don’t know what to do with (like Jon’s millions of CDs, his laserdisc collection and laserdisc player, multiple computers, monitors, keyboards, and a thousand other things that we just can’t part with). We decided this will be our pantry (DP Closet). But what about all that stuff in there? Much of it we donated to the goodwill because we really didn’t need it. But all of those other necessities (like Jon’s millions of CDs, his laserdisc collection and laserdisc player, multiple computers, monitors, and keyboards) we just drug out into the office until we could find a new home for them.
This is where we will put our chest freezer. We took measurements, researched online every size and style freezer imaginable, and what was the largest capacity we could get that would fit through the closet door and of course in the closet. Naturally, the closet door is much narrower than a standard door to another room. It was like a real life game of Tetris!
Finally, we thought we found one at Lowe’s that would fit and surprisingly would hold 13 cubic feet. We honestly did not think we could get one to hold that much for this tiny little space. I was so excited! I had never had an extra freezer of any size. This was going to be fantastic. Homesteading or not, now I could buy meat on sale! Yippee!
There was so much work to be done to get this closet made over into a pantry. Just cleaning it out was only part of it. We would also need a power outlet in the closet to plug the freezer in. Luckily our bedroom was on the other side of the wall so Jon pulled the wires through to the closet and put in a new outlet. It should have been simple, but the wiring was so tight there was hardly any slack to work with, but he would not be defeated.
Jon and Damien carried the freezer into the house. We had to move the computer desk to make room for maneuvering and take off the closet door, but viola we now have a freezer!
Now, what to do with all of this other stuff?
