Its still a bit too cold to do much outside, so we’ve been focusing on acquiring items to prepare for the thaw as well as items for inside. Our favorite “shopping mall” are local thrift stores, and the treasures we find sometimes amaze us.

Here’s one of our found treasures — an oil painting that is perfect for our dining room. I was absolutely thrilled.

One of my kitchen challenges has always been my dish rack. I felt like I started playing Tetris, then evolved into a leaning tower of disaster. With breakable dishes and cups, the tower of freshly washed dishes really became interesting. Jim surprised me with a double-decker dishrack, which I now love, love, love.

Maybe if I bought instant everything instead of making food from scratch I wouldn’t be so overjoyed to have a double-decker dishrack. Makes washing and stacking my dishes so much easier!

My pantry was starting to get nightmarish, so I decided to get some of those racks for canned food. We live so far from town that we shop once each month, which means we buy in bulk. Sounds easy enough until we get home and try to organize it all in the pantry. I opted to get commercial-quality racks that had to be ordered from a restaurant supply. They arrived and had to be assembled.

This is what they looked like when I finally figured out how to translate Chinese-English instructions.

Stacks of boxes piled on each other that took a lot of room were converted into an organized dream that is space efficient and makes getting ingredients really easy to access.

We hope as the cold is starting to ease that we can do some real work soon. Meanwhile, I’m enjoying finding ways of maximizing every inch of our future home.