Now I Whistle While I Work

The vanity - the long-lost vanity - arrived while Larry and I were away camping and, to tell the truth, I had already assumed I would never see it. But show up it did, so Wednesday I managed to get it out of its box (NOT EASY) and stand it up in the powder room.

The prodigal bathroom cabinet

"That's it, huh?" Larry asked.

"YES, IT IS," I said, and he knew to offer no opinions, smart guy that he is, even though it looks as though the sink is too small to wash his hands in.

I called the plumber and set up an appointment for Friday. I called our handyman, and he came over the next morning to look at it and make sure it would be ready for the plumber to hook up. Also, to get the $100 I still owed him, in case you're wondering why I get such good service...

"Hmmm, no," he said.

"NO?"

And he proceeded to show me how the cute little shelf and drawer and soap holder inside the cabinet - the features I had so lovingly picked out and waited for - would get in the way of hooking it up to the plumbing. And the cute little legs were too narrow for him to notch out space for them to fit around the baseboard tile.

"Just pick out a different one, like this," he said, randomly pointing to one on the Home Depot website, unaware of the more than 6 HOURS I had spent picking out the first one. I'll admit it, I felt somewhat smug when he realized that the one he chose would actually be too deep. 

"Oh, well," he said, walking out the door with his money, "just find one the right dimensions and call me when it arrives!" 

I'm probably gonna get another pedestal sink and shove it in there, I don't know.

But let us stop dwelling on renovation failures and instead revel in the renovation success I forgot to mention in the last post: the handyman - in the middle of that whole painting the den and the powder room episode - managed to TRANSFORM my kitchen. 

You see, last year I trash-picked the 4 deep kitchen drawers from our old house (2 doors down, same original cabinets) when the new owners there decided to redo their kitchen. I wasn't sure where I could put them, but our genius handyman thought to use the blank space between 2 cabinets (where we have always kept the large, big-family trash can) to build a cabinet for those drawers and somehow seemingly double the storage space in my vintage kitchen. 

The miracle of the scavenged drawers

Also? It looks really cute. And vintage - did I mention vintage?

Finally I can store my aluminum foil and plastic wrap in a drawer deep enough not to get caught on their boxes every time I open it. Finally, I have the newly emptied shallow drawer for all my silverware (which has been hanging out in a silverware holder on my counter for a few years now). Finally, I have drawers deep enough to hold dish towels and napkins and also things like water bottles and salad tongs and whisks. No more rummaging in overcrowded cabinets looking for the "too fat" utensils or the lid to a water bottle. Everything has a home now, and it is a beautiful sight to see.

A place for my potato ricer - a dream come true

Having a drawer for the dish towels and napkins freed up an entire pantry shelf - you know, the shelf where the kitchen linens resided in old cloth Target bins that had definitely seen better days? So now that shelf in the pantry can hold a whole bunch of stuff that didn't have a place in the kitchen before or was hard to reach.

I used to have to excavate those bowls from underneath a pile of water bottles

Because installing the drawers took away the spot for our (huge, 20-year-old) trash can, the handyman installed - in the cabinet next to our sink - one of those Simple Human garbage/recycling pull-out rack thingies with the cute little trash bin and the even cuter little recycling bin. 

OMG, I love this SO MUCH

Larry took one look at those adorable little receptacles and said, "THAT won't work. We have lots of trash. And stuff will get spilled inside the cabinet."

Because Larry thinks we still have a passel of feral kids living with us, I guess.

Folks, this overpriced piece of equipment has CHANGED MY LIFE. And no, nothing has spilled, and I no longer have to travel to the other end of the kitchen to dispose of a piece of recycling, and no more do I have to wrestle with the huge garbage can that never, ever wanted to let go of the full trash bag inside it. I feel as though animated little bluebirds are flying around my head as I stand at the sink and simply reach over a teeny bit to throw out trash and dispose of recycling, and then reach just a teeny bit the other way to put the compost in its countertop container. SO EFFICIENT.

Who knew The Container Store would have my happily ever after? WHO KNEW?

[NOT a sponsored post, and also, I had a nice coupon, thank goodness]