The shelf that made itself

A recent issue of Your Home and Garden (I've been reading back issues over breakfast, unfortunately in order of whichever I grab first while balancing a cuppa and cereal and dodging the little ginger, so I can't be more specific than to tell you it's one out of the stack) suggested taking the doors off cupboard fronts in the kitchen and displaying the contents as a kitchen feature. 

I liked the idea a lot - particularly the thought of hunting down a whole cupboard full of cool stuff to display (a colourful stack of Pantone mugs ...) - but I wasn't convinced it'd work in our kitchen and we don't really have that many cupboard-contents-on-display options with the little ginger and the not-ginger being ... a little ginger and a not-ginger.  Plus, on a practical level, there's a certain risk in taking a screwdriver to cabinetry.  You can never be entirely sure how it's going to work out.  My luck, the whole damn everything would fall down because it was somehow all held up by the one screw just removed.

Then a few days ago, rather in the spirit of things I thought, one of our cupboard doors fell off.  It'd been hanging, threateningly, by one hinge since shortly after we moved in, but it seemed like it'd balance there long enough for the husband to get around to fixing it. I have a feeling it must have been a cupboard never used by the previous owners, because it seems that when we moved in, we shocked it into life, and that shocked the life right out of it.  Anyway, it turns out that it looks cool as shelving - YAY!  Except that it was a cupboard full of absolute crap that will need to be jammed into another cupboard somewhere else (one that has a door), pronto.  And it's white, in a grey on grey kitchen, so it looks a little like the distant cousin who got the dress code horribly wrong at a family wedding.  But we have paint from when the previous owner redecorated and if I'm lucky the (charcoal) base colour for the kitchen will be out there.  Problem solved.

And FYI - I was right (that's really the important bit to note) to hedge on taking it down too it turns out, because once the cupboard door was on the floor we could see that the hinges had been screwed into and through a patch which had been glued on to the internal sides of the cupboard.  Joy.  One patch fell off, the other patch stayed on and will have to be chiselled off or something, and there's the matter of the other cupboard door to detach as well which could go any number of ways.  It's attached to a wall too actually, now that I look at it.  Dear universe, please, please don't let the wall fall down if we take the cupboard door off.

But anyway, that aside, tonight's project, as soon as I'm done here and I've suck a hot chocolate, is to transfer my baking equipment out of a low cupboard and up onto the newly-revealed shelves.  And that'll get me into the groove of thinking about this, which has made it to my doorstep.