When we remodeled the kitchen I wanted a huge window. My house is pretty dark inside because I have a bajillion trees in my yard. I try to cater to the winged things around here, so everything I plant is to try to benefit the birds, butterflies, and bees. Especially the bees because they are having such a rough time right now, and we need 'em!! (Who else is going to do all the pollinating?) I figured a great big window would give me one room where I could have the luxury of a little sunshine, even with all the trees. The only problem with that is it didn't leave much space for upper cabinets. None of my lower cabinet drawers were big enough to hold plates and glasses, so I found a couple cute, smaller, old cabinets that I could squeeze in, and went to work on them.

Even the paint brush I used came from a rummage sale!

This beauty was a $2 garage sale find.

Look how many different colors it had been in all it's years.

Bruce and I built a chalkboard to place to the right of the vent hood. I have a big problem with needing things to be symmetrical (which Bruce never lets me live down), and I felt this balanced things a bit better. I looked everywhere for another cabinet the same size as the one to the left of the hood, but no luck, so a chalkboard the same width and height as the cabinet had to do. The little cabinet came from an antique store outside of Portland. It was white, had clear glass in the door, a mirrored back, and was meant to sit on the floor. When I got it home I painted it black, had Bruce replace the mirror back with wainscoting, then painted the inside cream. In this picture the tile backsplash isn't up yet, but I already had the tile, some of which are slate with a pinecone design sandblasted on them. I made a photocopy of the pinecone tile onto sticky backed paper, stuck the paper onto the door glass, and cut out the pinecone design with a scripto knife. You can buy acid for glass etching and that is what I used. Then we screwed the cabinet to the wall, and filled 'er up! I also painted and acid etched the glass on a little old medicine cabinet I found, and put it on the adjacent wall at the end of the window. The bigger cabinet to the right was easier because it already was a kitchen cupboard and just had to be painted, no glass and such to fiddle with.

Getting ready to start the whole process of pineconing and acid etching the glass.

The light has to hit the glass just right in order to fully see the pinecones.

The larger cabinet on the right I use for plates, bowls, and glasses. It isn't deep enough to lay plates flat, so I bought an Ikea pot lid holder to put in the cabinet, and put the plates upright in the holder. The cabinet on the left is for spices and other cooking things.

I'll do another post on the kitchen later and show you the backsplash and everything else finished. These pictures were about 3/4 of the way thru the remodel.

Anyway, after all this cabinet information and stuff, the whole point of this post was to show you where I ended up having to put my neato fish anniversary dishes. It turns out they are too tall to fit into the cabinet. I couldn't bear to not be able to look at them and use them, so I copy catted something I saw awhile back.

This great old tool caddy fits the bill. I found it at an estate sale this fall for a whopping $5. Cleaned it up, polyurethaned it, and those fishes fit in there swimmingly (sorry 🙂 ). It even has zinc tacked on the ends, so it custom coordinates with my countertop!

TTFN 🙂

Teresa

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