Things to Do In the Winter When You Can't Garden

I didn't used to be a coffee drinker, but somewhere in my 50s I decided that if I added enough milk and sugar to it, it was palatable. Nor can I tolerate much caffeine, so I limit myself to once cup a day, unless I think I need a cup of coffee in the late afternoon then I fix a decaf coffee pod. The Head Gardner, on the other hand, drinks a lot of coffee. Providing space for coffee making then can get complicated. For some reason brewing coffee is not as easy as it used to be: a coffee pot and a tin can of coffee nicely stored in the cupboard. Now coffee drinks have so many choices. Just look on Pinterest and find a plethora of coffee brewing machines and the accoutrements that go along with the habit of coffee drinking. Along with all of the flavored coffees and blends and roasts, there are choices for making the coffee taste less like coffee such as the flavored syrups, powders, and liquid creamers. All of which has to be stored.

 For my one cup a day, I seem to have gone to a lot trouble; however, it is not all about me. The HG loves his coffee and drinks plenty of it on some days. I ended up with two coffee makers and coffee and creamer and so on taking up real estate on the kitchen counter, and I hated the mess.

Worse, the steam from the 10 cup coffee maker was beginning to damage the finish on my wood cabinet, so I needed to make a change. You can barely see it on the lower edge of the door, a whitening of the finish.


I came up with the idea of creating a coffee bar in the wasted space in the kitchen. I've spent two days on the project looking for a suitable cabinet. Yesterday the HG and I when to two furniture stores look for such  a cabinet. They were either outrageously prices or just didn't have the right look: Early Marriage Hand-Me-Down.

(Visitors come to the house and admire my antique furniture. I laugh and tell them that when we were first married we were so poor that we scavenged any discarded pieces that family had parked in garages, spare bedrooms, and barns. Today these pieces are family heirlooms and some of them are priced out of my budget in the antique stores.

Then my daughter called this morning. She, too, is on a clean, organize, and purge campaign in her house and she offered me a little dresser that she says I bought off of Craig's for one of her babies and it is perfect. In fact similar dressers appear as coffee bars on Pinterest. So FREE is the best price. She was happy to get ride of it, and the HG who goes for coffee with his friends every Monday was in her neighborhood and brought it home to me.

Everything coffee is stored here, now; including tea. I even have more storage now for table clothes and aprons and sundry other things. Moving my teas has freed up space in another drawer for utensils.

I store my coffee, decaf and regular in quart Mason Jars so that I don't have dig in the pantry every morning and the powdered creamer that I buy in bulk is also stored in a canning jar.

On the left I have Trivia with sugar on the right, and some sweets left over from Christmas in between

My coffee pod maker along with the coffee bean grinder and my special Chi tea bags.

And empty space on the counter. I like my counters clear with as little as possible stored on them and the coffee bar was simple solution to an over crowded area that I needed to clean up.

This wasted space has been home to a variety of different pieces of furniture. I used to keep a child size cabinet full of make believe children's tea sets for them to play with, but they are all outgrowing the play space.

I even worked on this cabinet today. Now this is one those discarded,  stored in the barn pieces that was in my grandmother's house down in the basement in the coal room. Then it was in my mother cellar, now it holds family treasures, including my small teapot collection. I took out the miscellaneous things today and organized my tea pots. On the bottom shelf is the set from my mother's wedding china. On the next shelf is my snowman set, a birthday gift last year. I love the large cups that I use during the winter.

The third tea pot is a Lenox that I found in an antique store then I went on Replacements.com and found the sugar and creamer set. The top teapots have the cardinal on them. So now I have my little collection nicely displayed.

So that is what one does on a winter's day. Clean, organize, and purge.

Looks like I need to do the same with the pet supplies. 

Thanks for stopping by the Garden Spot. Hopefully there will be some gardening going on sometime soon.

I'll be joining Angie for Mosaic Monday. See you there.