Happy New Year Y’all.
On New Year’s Day, I posted about the yearly Pantry Challenge. I had meal prepped, and menu prepped…and I was excited to get back to it and use what I have over the next couple months. If you don’t know Jessica of Good Cheap Eats, get to know her – she is amazing. Regular mom logic. AND here is her info about the Pantry Challenge. But as life does on occasion – we came home to a change of plans. Our electricity was off and we lost all our frozen/fridge food.
We cleaned up the mess, cleaned out both fridge/freezers, and then washed our pups (who were with a sitter whilst we were gone, who has other animals and watches lots of dogs) and finally got to bed about 2am. I have not given up though.
January 5th was my hubby’s 63rd birthday, and by this past weekend, we were semi stocked up and ready to participate again. We only replaced parts of what we lost and didn’t buy new pantry items… and though we won’t technically save money, we have pledged to eat at home for the next few weeks, and were creative with our purchases.
Speaking of Creative… I wanted to share with you how I made my kitchen bigger by extending/creating a wall. Here, I extended the living room wall with bookshelves and a hutch (it needs painting and was free):
These pics show the pantry (aka the backside of bookshelves) and the refrigerator behind the red piece. The meal calendar was what I’d done before I left.
Our Second fridge/freezer is on our enclosed porch. I will be contacting our insurance company today about how to recoup anything we can. And later on this evening, I will post pics of our apartment we moved into in September (not duplicating today’s pics). Other than power outages, we are really enjoying it.
Don’t let anything sway you from your plan. Regroup and get back to it.
Love, Hugs & Blessings,
LadyEm
LadyEm ~ Under Mary's Mantle 
Happy New Year and Happy and healthy birthday for your husband🙏
I’m sorry for the loss of food and hope the insurance company reimbursement is generous.
You are creative and and reusing perfectly good furniture, I applaud you, I too reinvent.
Wish you much happiness in your new home.
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Thanks so much. Yes, our insurance covered about 2/3 of the loss. And yes, I repurpose food and furniture. Whatever it is… no waste. LOL. And thanks. It’s weird not to have young ones at home. But living in Italy supporting the MIL is a challenge and I no longer wanted a bigger house here.
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