Scrounge & Splurge

I'm so pleased to show you my latest additions to my mudroom. This room doubles as my sewing studio, chick brooder, seedling nursery, and storage for all my stashes - from chicken food to seedlings, to fabrics. I needed more shelving! 

In a typical-for-us combination of thrift and spendthrift we (and by that, I mean the talented woodworker husband, TWH) made a 6 1/2ft long, 13in wide board from two reclaimed bedrails. The TWH found the bedframe at the swap shed at our town dump. It was labeled 'solid walnut' but we think it's beech wood. He joined the two narrower long pieces sideways to make one wide board and planed it to remove the previous stain and finish. 

Then we re-stained it and he finished it with some who-knows-how-old linseed oil that was in the basement of the house when we bought it. Mounted to the wall with my three definitely-not-thrifted, fancy brackets, it was just what I wanted. The spacing of the brackets isn't perfect but we had to work with the studs we had and the length of the board/available space in the room, so it is what it is. Add a random assortment of wicker baskets (from the dump, why do you ask?), and voila:

I'm thinking of adding hooks to the underside of the board to be able to hang garlic and onions to cure (if I ever manage to grow onions worth curing, that is). Or flowers and herbs to dry. 

That lavender oatmeal soap is still on my mind. On a rare solo outing into the world of brick and mortar, mainstream shops and stores, I saw some for sale at a staggering $7.98 per small bar at a fancy kitchen store today. Where they also sold plastic grapefruit saver containers, plastic onion saver containers, plastic lemon/lime saving containers, plastic garlic saving containers, plastic bell pepper saving containers and, believe it or not, plastic tomato savers (Who doesn't finish a tomato?). The display took up more than the combined counterspace in my entire kitchen. Seriously? But now I'm on a tangent. Back to business. 

 

My mini mudroom do-over is rounded out by this yard sale find. The front board slides up and out, not sure why, but it seems so nifty. I'm a sucker for naive country art (not the gift store kind, though). My kids see that stuff and tell me that one day, I'll have my own farm. They're sure of it.