Our kitchen, like many others, has a pantry.
When we were under construction, this small but invaluable room helped us to get by. On the few shelves within it, we housed the entirety of our kitchen necessities to get through the renovations – plates, glasses, dry food. Apart from one cardboard box used to store pans, everything else was in storage. We really couldn’t have got by without that small room of a pantry.
Whilst everything in the kitchen was completely transformed, demolished and then recreated, this room is now the last remaining element of our past kitchen.
And it’s time to destroy it!
We all need somewhere to hide that ugly stuff don’t we? The vacuum. Mops. Ironing boards. C’mon, it’s all pretty boring stuff, but it has to go somewhere! There has been a concrete block in our pantry which needs to be removed for us to make space for all of this household junk.
I didn’t know this beforehand, but it’s amazing what it originally did. I’m told that at a time when refrigerators weren’t so commonly used, these cold hard blocks would offer the cool environment needed to keep food fresher. Am I the only person that thinks that’s kind of interesting? And also, I feel shocked that it mustn’t have been all that long ago. Hey, you learn something every day I suppose.
The fact is, we needed the space though. And whilst I’m sentimental, it’s just a concrete block after all.
This sounds like a job for Clough and Clough to me! (aka Joe and his dad).
Whilst Joe tells me that he would have loved to go at the block with a sledgehammer, since it is embedded into the walls, this kind of impact could have disturbed the surrounding brick and it wasn’t worth any more destruction than necessary.
Instead, they angle grinded around the edge of the concrete to weaken the structure. It was propped up by a car jack and bricks so it didn’t fall on their heads (safety first, people!). Then, down it came in pieces with a bit of muscle and the help of a bolster chisel and hammer. See below for the picture version of this story…
The guys did good. It was a seriously messy job, which brought back with it the dreaded dust. But after a quick sweep, a bag of ready mix plaster to cover up the new wall gaps, and a fresh lick of paint, it’s ready for a new chapter. I hear babies need a lot of stuff so the more storage we can get our hands on, the better!
As you can see from the finished picture below, we’ve kept the original shelves in for now, the window has been boarded up, flooring has been added which matches the rest of the kitchen and at the minute we’re using the room to house the CCTV. Just need to add the junk back now!
