Repurposed Armoire Six Steps From the Kitchen

It’s sweltering in the desert, yet each morning, I sit in the garden sipping chilled cacao from a French glass, listening to sizzling cicada, while observing our chickens scratch and excavate the shrouded rose garden presently blanketed with bedsheets to protect leaves. Sometimes it is ninety-five degrees at nine in the morning! It’s not a dry heat; it’s an oven, as opposed to a sauna, and it is not for anyone who enjoys moist cool breezes. Since it is the end of June, the kitchen garden has mostly gone to seed, except for basil which flowers and reseeds hoping for the next season. Cantaloupes and some squash can be planted now, but gardening is less, so some mornings I bring the computer outdoors, sit under a Palo Verde, meaning a green stick, to absorb flickering light, with an occasional wayward Mesquite bean bouncing off my head while browsing Instagram. 

Some readers may recall that I micro-blog on Instagram. As a person who thinks in pictures, I enjoy viewing photos; though at times, like others I am sure, reassessing and questioning the purposes of platforms. Many of the accounts that I subscribe to are followed for their simplicity in their way of life. I also follow a few breathtaking accounts, especially garden accounts, not just because of the gardens, but because a desert-life causes a fascination with green lush spaces. Sometimes, I look at the comments, and this particular type of response, puzzles me and makes me ponder; and, it plays something like this; and, I am not quoting anyone, nor paraphrasing, just putting an idea out there, this fictional phrase of my own words, not uncommonly expressed, perhaps meant literally but more likely figuratively: I want your life. 

Growing up, if I wanted an item or an experience, my father, an itinerant plumber, a man of faith, would often question me with this likely familiar aphoristic choice, “If your friend jumps off a bridge, are you going to follow?” _ Well of course not! So, growing-up, from an early age, I needed to make and improve my own life, even when that meant I dreamt from a travel trailer parked beside a picnic table. In those days, it often involved building doll houses and its furnishings for me and my sisters from scraps of things thrown away, catching tadpoles in the creek, selling newspapers, and doing chores. Growing up, we created our life from our own imagination and hands, and we started small and we worked and contributed, whether it be a parochial education, college, or a home: an apartment, a condo, a house, a garden, a backyard orchard, chickens…. travel…Whatever that dream was… the mission was to make it live within our means.

As an adult with my own family, we traveled a bit abroad because we live small and buy many items second-hand. First, from travel experiences, I admire the petite modest, efficient kitchen. It amazes me how people can attain full function in a small space. Secondly, I have a fondness for authentic country-style French and English kitchens because they look acquired and built over time, and the preciousness arises from the wear of the items and the unfitted cabinets. For instance,  I love the concept of an English larder. An English larder is basically an armoire with a marble shelf, additional shelves, and drawers purposed as a food pantry in smaller cottage-style kitchens. 

Up until a year ago or so, we shopped for groceries regularly, because our home is near a market. But, it’s a small home, with a small kitchen, limited storage, and a small refrigerator. Shopping less, meant that the extra food was stored in a bedroom, but it was not convenient nor, comfortable crawling under a bed in jeans or searching a tiny dark closet with a phone light on hands and knees with eyeglasses landing on the floor in the abyss.

One day, a few months ago, I was standing in the kitchen fretting and wondering where I stored a certain food item when I eyed our pretty armoire in the dining area, and while admiring it as usual, I then realized it was six steps from the kitchen, and then an idea sprung to repurpose it into a larder. At that time, the armoire was stuffed to its brim with flowery vintage dishes. However, since I love setting a table with a variety of dishes, I could not part with them. So, to make my dream larder out of the armoire, the dishes needed to be relocated, which brought about another project before fully realizing this “English” larder. 

I emptied the armoire and created stacks upon stacks of dishes on my dining table, coffee table, and floor, and for days it stayed that way. Then I slowly thought out and planned how to refill it while simultaneously designing the dish storage project that my spouse would help realize. In the armoire, I placed a marble slab from an inexpensive, no longer used cabinet, on the armoire’s bottom shelf. On the marble, I stored different fruit, like citrus from our trees, until it needed refrigeration for consumption. From the kitchen, I relocated my dry good Bell jars with my baking goods to make a baking center on a shelf. I again purposed the first two drawers for silverware. The other four drawers I repurposed for food storage. Now there are individual drawers devoted to boxed pasta, canned meat or fish, canned fruits or sweets, and canned vegetables. The shelves store baking goods, boxed goods, bottles, and larger canned goods.

There’s a tenderness within my heart, when I pull open the larder’s rheumatic, though delightful flowered stenciled doors with rat-tail hinges and reach for an item; this piece serves our family better than it did as an armoire. From a piece of furniture that we already owned, we created a bucolic, nostalgic, functional larder for a small kitchen with a feeling of English countryside. It’s not today’s big walk-in pantry, but for us and for a small home it is quite satisfying. I am happy to see our food stored in a beautiful cabinet and not crawl on the floor in the dark, nor have a need to walk to another room to retrieve an item. 

From an early life well taught to my present small home in the desert, so much of learning to live has been perspective and a willingness to construct a version of beauty with what was available to me and within my means. Unique, quaint, quirky, vintage, one project at a time, adapting pieces that you own, and incorporating new ideas along the way; wherever you find yourself, whatever you find, within reach there is inspiration and possibility.