Good Morning Fam. Praying you all are having a fabulous day and start to your morning. Today I figured I would talk to you about our recent renovations to the homestead. This one was kinda on a whim and while I absolutely enjoyed this, I will say I need to work on my timing. Im very much the one that gets the idea and then need to work on the project right away instead of planning out according to life. So we spent about 2 days doing this project, well the “renovations” and then another 2ish days working on moving everything. An overall 4 day process but let’s get into this!
We recently were feeling like the dinning room was way too cramped and our canning shelves were full. Well with it being canning season now and I need to restock a lot of our tomato items, I knew we needed to at least add some more shelving. But how would that be possible if the shelves were already full and we are trying to add more? Obviously that doesn’t make sense. So next thought, let’s build more shelves. Ok, but once again, we were booked on space and couldn’t possibly add any more. This led to finally mentally getting myself ok with using the crawl space below the house as a root cellar. It stays a beautiful cool temp throughout the house.The winter its not horrible, it is actually just a steady cool temp. Jeremy had suggested this previously but I have had a hold up due to wolf rats, snacks and lizards. They are not my friend. But after a little bit of time, I worked out the thought and really got on board with Jeremys idea of using the crawl space instead.
Now, we needed shelving…… Yea so this is where my brain went crazy and poor Jeremy just went along for the ride. He had to do the heavy lifting and the wood working. I mean I could but at this particular time, I had been fighting fatigue and shaky hands. It was just better if Jeremy took over and I kept with just cleaning. So the plan….. Ok let me first say we have two canning shelves. One is small and one is huge. I know, very descriptive. Well the huge one we decided to move down into the crawl space. With this we were able to cut the legs off of this and make two of the same size canning shelves instead of the one we had. As in, this canning shelf had 4 shelves but now we cut the legs off and can get another 4 shelves made. We just need to get the wood to do so. But we at least got the already made shelving back up and in place to move the canned goods downstairs.
Once the shelves were moved I actually moved everything in that room and cleaned the entire room with a good deep clean and then we painted. We went with the same color as we did in the kitchen. This process took about 2 days but by the end of the second day we were able to put everything in their place. Now we did take this time to actually rearrange the room so we could have better use of the space. We also added in shelves to one wall. You see we also were struggling for space for all of the big items we uses for canning season. For example, canner, pressure canner, big stock pots and a steamer.
After all of that was organized and the shelving in the crawl space was put back up, we started to move all of our canned items. This took 2 days but we split that up mainly only because we started late in the evening on the first night. We could have done this all in one day but ended up taking our time. We managed to move those items down stairs and organize everything in a better system.
Now my favorite part!!! The small canning shelf is still upstairs in the dinning room. We have decided to use this as like our little grocery shopping space. Essentially we can get what we need from the shelf and we can restock then from downstairs when we need it. With having such variety of items, we have a few rows where we only have one of each item. For example, Salsa. I have fiesta salsa, 4 jalapeño, 6 jalapeño and more. So we took one of each type and kept it upstairs. While the rest were organized downstairs in rows. But items like pasta sauce, we did about 4 jars worth. The items we will use a lot will get an entire row. That way we do not have to worry about having to go grab more downstairs all of the time. We are making it worth our while by keeping multiples of our most used items.
I would say this was a simple and easy so called renovation. But I will say, I absolutely loved being able to get this one done. I think the next project I try to accomplish will be to paint our hallway and our fireplace. The fireplace would be nice to do since we are not using it right now but I need to figure out how I need to prep the already painted brick first. Then I will be all about getting that project done now during the summer. A simple reno for a simple blog! I’ll chat with you all next week!