Four and a half years ago when we walked into the house we would eventually call ours, I immediately saw the cupboards hanging over the counter and thought “They would have to come down”.

When we finally did buy the house, I mentioned this to Charles and he said “But we need the cupboard space”. He was right, and yet I still plotted the demise of those cupboards for four and a half years. I tried to figure out what we could store in the basement to lessen our kitchen storage needs, but most things that went down just came back up eventually. I tried to thin out our kitchen requirements entirely, but that too was unsuccessful. I’m pretty sure I investigated the idea of a pantry on the wall beside our bay window, but the space is not very deep so no standard pantry would fit. I finally resigned myself to waiting for whenever we fully remodel our kitchen (although functional, some parts of it ain’t pretty. Thankfully the yellow stove went away the day we moved in).

A few weeks ago, Charles mentioned a “crazy” idea he had about buying a pantry to put against the free wall and tearing down the hanging cupboards. I don’t think he had even finished his sentence before I jumped in with my response (“YES!”) and no more than an hour passed before I was online to see what I could find. The odd size of the space and the busy-ness of Christmas delayed the plan for a few weeks, but on New Years Eve we finally bought a pantry that (mostly) fit, and I woke up to banging on New Years Day as Charles hammered it together. By noon the pantry was up and secured to the wall and the cupboards were down.

And then there was LIGHT!

For the past two days, we’ve marvelled at why we didn’t do it earlier. Perhaps 2012 is the year of getting things done.