Slave labour ahoy!

[wiseheart]

I've found a few moths a-fluttering around the kitchen lately, so I decided that cleaning out the pantry was the needful thing to do.

Not that we'd actually have a pantry, mind you. When these mass accommodations were built, back in the 1960s and 1970s, people responsible for them decided, in their endless wisdom, that pantries are a waste of space and that a corner cupboard in the kitchen would suffice. Therefore literally thousands of families in this city live without any sensible storage space for their food. Because (surprise, surprise!) they use quite some parts of aforementioned kitchen cupboard to store their pans and baking tins and rolling pins and... I'm sure you get the picture. The actual kitchen cupboards (above the barely existing working surface) are just big enough for the cups and plates.

Hungarians are a resourceful people, though, so they found various and highly creative ways to solve the problem. Our solution was to have shelves put up in a totally useless little niche between the bathroom and the built-in wardrobes. Up to the ceiling. So I was hopping on and off our little two-step ladder all morning to empty those shelves, open every box and check for moth larvae, clean the shelves and put everything back again, in a (hopefully) more logical order than before. Now I might be able to find my baking supplies a bit easier than before.

For the record: no moth younglings were found. The fully developed ones must have been visiting from the outside - until I murdered them with extreme prejudice.

As a result of this, my back is now worse than it was, and no creative work was done today. But there are some things that have to be done, no matter the costs.

Comments

[meathiel]

Glad you didn't find any more moths. Beastly things.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

They are. Once they got into the raisins and walnuts in our so-called pantry and weaved everything into their webs (yes, they do that, hard as it is to believe). We had to throw out foodstuffs that cost thousands that time. They were even in the paper napkins and teabags! So yeah, I've learned my lesson.

[chocolate-frapp.livejournal.com]

I don't feel I have enough storage space in my apt for kitchen stuff and I'm not even a family, I live alone!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

There is never enough space for kitchen stuff. Especially if you love baking!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Amen to that! It is the great pleasure of my retirement that I actually do have enough space now. But only for now, of course, because as I have more space I can buy things I didn't have room for before...

Planners in the 1970s were almost as bad when it comes to small apartments in the UK - my mother's friend kept her fridge in the living room and quite a lot of her cooking equipment in a box beside it.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Our neighbours have a freezer in their anteroom, just opposite the entrance door. They have to squeeze themselves along it every time they go from the kitchen to the living room and back. Which is why we opted for a combined fridge-freezer that fit into the only niche left between the kitchen sink and the corner cupboard...

[adafrog.livejournal.com]

{{{hugs}}} Glad you got it all done, at least.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Almost done. The upper shelf still needs to be checked, but only tin boxes are there - empty ones.

[mirasaui.livejournal.com]

Moths can be a nightmare. I have not seen any here yet, but we are having a gnat invasion outdoors, and besides being annoying and in-your-face, these new ones bite!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Oh, drat, that can't be pleasant!

[artemis10002000]

Oh man, do you also have moth problems? Damn, I'm sorry. We've been having this issue for years at Mom's. We have the place plastered with moth paper and then it looks fine but as soon as we remove the moth paper, the moths return. Have yet to track down all their hiding places though we found a few when we first dealt with this plague.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

We have a few of them from time to time - I think they are migrating via the airing system that runs along all ten storeys. The bath and the loo don't have windows, so these airing ducks are the only way there.