#snapshots from zero island center

[sos-amchespin-sendhelp]

((OOC: never seen an PKMN IRL blog with a soundtrack before, have you?))

((This particular song is meant to be a "dungeon theme" to accompany the "Snapshots from Zero Island Center" arc. But once Algernon reconnects with his past life as a musician — and more importantly, discovers there's FL Studio on his phone — you might hear some in-universe compositions written by our hero! Eventually!))

[sageinthegarden]

A new snapshot from https://sagesacre.com/2021/04/19/this-is-california-native-plant-week/

This is California Native Plant Week

The middle of April has played host to celebrations of nature for thousands of years. The ancient Roman festival of Cerealia, in honor of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture and grains, begins this week with a series uniquely Roman parties and special events (yes, wine and goats are involved).

Arbor Day, first celebrated back in the 1500’s is usually observed around this time as is its modern day successor, Earth Day.

Less well known, but equally important IMHO, is that it’s also California Native Plant Week. (Keep in mind, neighbors in Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Northern and New Mexico, we have a lot of native plants in common.)

Bound by the Sierra Nevada mountains and Mojave desert to the east and the Pacific ocean to the west, the geography of the state gives it unique weather and the largest number of plant species of anywhere in the U.S., a third of which are found nowhere else. It also gives California nearly 40 million residents (the entire population of Canada), which means a lot of our native plants are being squeezed out; cleared for housing and infrastructure and often replaced with non-natives that are poorly adapted for the climate and often outright invasive.

A native, California State flower and a zero maintenance flower that returns every year

This is unfortunate and unnecessary be we have plenty of native plants and trees here in California — and throughout the west — that look great in a garden or landscape setting, provide food and shelter for critters, and, best of all, are water wise and dead simple to care for.

Sadly, “native plants” and “native landscaping” are still considered niches (like the local stuff is “weird” compared to plants from China and the Mediterranean), so big box stores and larger commercial nurseries don’t usually carry California natives or provide any education on their many advantages. There are, however, many native plant enthusiasts, organizations and nurseries dedicated to raising raising awareness and availability of native plants, making it easier than ever to learn about and create your own California native garden.

Which brings us to California Native Plant Week, a seven day event the California Native Plant Society describes like this:

Each day of California Native Plant Week, CNPS will unveil 360° virtual tours. From home gardens to apartments, city parks to wildlands, these 360° tours will share the different ways Californians care for and enjoy native plants. The tours also reflect a diversity of gardeners, from urbanites to suburban homeowners, Indigenous culture keepers to high school teachers. The tours are accessed entirely online and offer an immersive experience with clickable interpretation, plant identification tags, navigation features and hyperlinked plant lists.

That’s pretty awesome on it’s own (also envy causing when you see some of the gardens), but even better is that the CNPS website will help you identify and locate a nursery source for pretty much any California native you’re looking for.

A native Desert Agave because if you’re going to Agave, go big. Like 8 feet of spiky, stabby blue agave.

And if you can’t find it there, forums like those on Facebook and Reddit can connect you with others who also have insight into how/where to source native plants. It also doesn’t hurt to make friends with your friendly, neighborhood nursery employee who might have the inside track on native plant sources.

For my part, while I’m not out there actively pressing for people to rip out their current landscape and switch to California natives, I am leading by example, swapping in local flora as I remake portions of The Acre.

What was once a slope of English Ivy is now (mostly) native sages.

Cleveland Sage, a California native in bloom in April

A Cleveland Sage sprawls and blooms on a sunny, west-facing hillside

A native black sage (Salvia mellifera) in flower

A native black sage (Salvia mellifera) sprawled out on the hillside in spring

The front garden along our road is now a mix of native chaparral and sages rather than the row of Canary Island palms (I sold the palms, so they’re out lining the parking lot of an outlet center somewhere in Arizona).

Artemesia California A gray-green sagebrush

Sagebrush doesn’t look like much, but it smells amazing. Like The West.

My hummingbird sage colony (Salvia spathacea). Native north of here, it seems to have settled in quite nicely under oak, pine and eucalyptus

Hummingbird sage in flower in spring

California buckwheat growing among black and hummingbird sage

And the live oak dry creek that was first used as a dump 50 years ago and later became a goat pen, is now being restored with California lilacs, holly, sages and gooseberry.

Fuschiaflower Gooseberry (Ribes speciosum) with a wild cucumber (Marah macrocarpa) growing over it

A closeup of the fuschiaflower gooseberry (Ribes speciosum) in flower

You don’t see sneezeweed (Helenium puberulum) in gardens much anymore, but it’s a great plant

A closeup of a sneezeweed (Helenium puberulum) flower. It doesn’t actually make you sneeze.

One of the other big upsides to going native with the landscape beyond not watering anything is my poultry (chickens and ducks with free range of the yard) don’t eat the landscaping. They do, however, shelter under it and eat the weeds, grasses and various insect pests that hide out there. Kind of a triple bonus when you think about it.

-*-

Check out California Native Plant Week on the California Native Plant Society website

Native plants mentioned in this article

Black Sage Salvia mellifera

California Buckwheat Eriogonum fasciculatum

California Sagebrush Artemisia californica

Cleveland Sage Salvia clevelandii

Desert Agave Agave deserti

Fuchsiaflower Gooseberry Salvia spathacea

Sneezeweed Helenium puberulum

Wild Cucumber Marah macrocarpa

[attract-mode-collective]

Just Another Late Night At The Game Center

And just another massive dose of game culture, as originally shared on the Attract Mode Twitter account, (most of) everything that was shared in the latter half of February. The first half was covered here.

Before I forget: the above is courtesy of erickimphotography.com.

Again, given how short Feb is supposed to be, I figured this post would be too... and it's not. So am wonder if going weekly might best going forward?

Anyhow, where did I leave off last time? Oh yeah; Valentine's Day. And here’s Amy Rose, from the day after, reminding us all that, as great as love can be, it also hurts (via sonicthehedgeblog)...

Check out this devastating big boot from Mario, one that would make the WWE's Undertaker or Kane proud (via suppermariobroth)...

You're no doubt familiar with Julie Bell's work, but are you aware of the close resemblance between her art & the artist herself? (via slbtumblng)...

Some nice, pixelated sukajans we have here (via kauzara)...

Look at these hipsters...

Look at these hipsters standing around, on a Brooklyn rooftop...

Look at these hipsters standing around, on a Brooklyn rooftop in leggings based upon the interactive menu for the Super Famicom's satellite modem peripheral. (via minusworld.co.uk)...

Am legit thinking of getting this shirt covered with quotes from people trying to figure out which Metal Gear character is gay (via kotaku.com)...

Am rather fond of Data Weave, which has more than a passing resemblance to the Eliss scarf that helped put the Attract Mode shop on the map (via prostheticknowledge)...

When you go to bed, don't forget to never use your Dreamcast as a pillow (nor should you ever place it on a bucket filled with leafy greens either, but you probably already knew that one; via posthumanwanderings)...

Not sure which SNK 40th Anniversary shirt I like more (via miki800.com)...

It's just Hidetaka Suehiro, playing... I think The Last Blade? Criminally underrated Neo Geo game btw (via nintendu)...

And the late, great Robin Williams playing Ground Zero Texas for the Sega CD (via celebgames)...

Plus the President of Turkey, circa 1990, playing Galaxy Force II for whatever reason (via historium)..

Pro-tip to any & all custom arcade cabinet sellers: if you're going to photograph someone playing a game on your thing, have said person actually play the thing (in this case, Robotron utilizes dual sticks and no buttons; via arcadephile)...

Today's recommended reading is a follow-up to another older post, one that's all about Willie Williams, who not only inspired Virtua Fighter's Jeffry McWild but also Tekken's Paul Phoenix (via lordmo)...

After seeing this gif of a young woman punching a dinosaur (or possibly a dragon) in the crotch, I may have to give Capcom Fighting Jam a second look (via kazucrash)...

Sticking with the subject of crotches for just one bit, everyone out there's familiar with PuLiRuLa, right? (via kazucrash)

Just a friendly reminder of how wacky commercials for the PlayStation 2 were back in the day (via kurhl)...

Back to the subject of dinosaurs... yet still sticking with fun under the sun (via sidestorygaiden)...

If I'm gonna share fan art of unofficial PlayStation 1 era mascots, then I have to pass along this rendering of Abe (via it8bit)...

Seen countless folk play music with a Game Boy or a NES... but a Dreamcast? @slowmagic is the very first, and with a Hello Kitty edition Dreamcast no less...

Does anyone know if these figures of Dorimukyasuko & friends were commercially produced or if they were just made for the Sega no Game wa Sekai Ichi~i~i~I ad that the image comes from? (via vgprintads)...

We've gotten snowfall here in NYC over the past few weeks, once during during sunset, but alas it wasn't nearly as pretty as this (via kirokazepixel)...

It's been ages since I've posted any Game Culture Snapshots, despite countless promises that I'd fix that. Well, until that finally happens, here just one, from IndieCade East 2018. Which was an epic bust, but hey, at least I finally got to play that Bill Viola game I first encountered at GDC 2008...

PLEASE tell me that GBA Video carts are the new hot means of distributing bootleg Hollywood flicks (via @katribou)...

This part from The Thing always reminded me of Asteroids on the Atari 7800 (via pixpunk)...

I posted this on Twitter, not realizing that I had shared it on the blog once before. But since I can’t find that original post, and since it's so damn nice, plus totally worth looking at again (via humanoidhistory)...

I also need to re-share that Tron movie poster cuz it's the first lead up to this Blade Runner-related spread from Joystik Magazine (via mendelpalace)...

As someone who fetishizes old video game magazines, I'm legit ashamed that I didn't know about Joystik sooner (via here & here)...

Please enjoy a healthy helping of scans from Lovely Sweet Dream, the dream journal that would become the basis of LSD for the PlayStation 1 (via here & here)...

Sorry, but I still think the idea of a multi-billionaire sending his sports car into space just cuz he can to be kinda cringey, yet that doesn't mean I'd don't think this pixelated recreation is any less pleasant (via it8bit)...

I've never been to Beverly Hills, so I have no idea if this portrayal according to Super Chase: Criminal Termination is accurate or not; maybe it was when the game was produced? (via obscurevideogames)...

Meanwhile, closer to where I am (somewhat; am not all that far from Long Island) is Mario & Yoshi & the Book of Revelation (via greathaircut)...

Are you playing Mario? Or is Mario playing you? (via suppermariobroth)...

Game Boys. And Game Girls. Mostly Girls. (via contac)

Before anyone asks, no, I do not have a bigger/wallpaper appropriate-sized version of this super sexy image of a couple of Wiis (via klaus-laserdisc)...

I think I kinda need to do this to my PlayStation (via dreamcast.tokyo)...

... Which reminds of those fancy, souped up by audiophiles PSXs I mentioned a whiles ago...

I celebrated Cat Day in Japan by posting this fave official King of Fighters illustration (via videogamesdensetsu)....

... along with this Monster Hunter fan art (via kerriaitken)...

... plus this highlight of a fave WarioWare: Twisted micro game (via suppermariobroth)...

So yeah, Flash sucks, I get that, but as the platform fades away, so does the opportunity to play games like Fear Less! (via zombie-chaser)...

Thankfully, WORLD OF HORROR, "a love letter to the cosmic horror work of Junji Ito", is something that's much more accessible (for now at least)...

I don't know much about Dujanah, which has you assuming the role of a Muslim woman with grievances against a military force that's occupying her Islamic homeland, other than it looks extremely compelling...

Yet another game I need to check out is CONTINUUM, which is a shmup that combines time manipulation and Tetris? (via alpha-beta-gamer)...

It's a legit shame that Jetpack Squad has seemingly fallen off the map (via shmups)...

Another shmup that I really, really want to play (though it's starting to feel increasingly unlikely) is AEROBAT, which looks just as gorgeous (and insane) today as it did the first time I laid eye (via shmups)...

Yet another game that was never meant to be, and the only thing we have here is some incredible looking concept art; if it ended up happening & was any good, I wonder if I'd be a PC-FX owner? (via videogamesdensetsu)...

If a Tokyo Dark Souls was ever to happen, which artist's take do you prefer; this one (via visor-visual)...

... or this one? (via mendelpalace)

You know about celebrity roasts, right? Well, a comedy club in Long Island City had one for Mario, though I have no idea how it went; I had kung fu practice that night...

Me, when the coffee kicks in (via anthony10000000)...

I had no idea that Typing of the Space Harrier was even a thing (via posthumanwanderings)...

It's a bit unsettling how some of Dreamcast Magazine's advice on how to survive Y2K are still useful today, in particular their words of wisdom regarding Seaman (via posthumanwanderings)...

Megadora Man, a Tokusatsu-esque take on the Mega Drive, for Beep! Mega Drive; am assuming his foes are inspired by the Famicom and PC Engine (though am not totally sure which is which; via obscurevideogames)...

Question: how hard would it be for someone in the US to get the first three issues of Famitsu from the Japanese Kindle Store? (via miki800.com)

Been well over a decade since first laying eyes and I FINALLY know the identity of the artist behind a series of Mario illustrations that has long left me stupefied: his name is Ishihara Gōjin (via videogamesdensetsu)...

I woke up the other day with a sense of purpose, with the knowledge that I finally have a mission in life: to do whatever I can to make this dancing kid from Sega Splash Golf a viral sensation (via sonicthehedgeblog)...

Though speaking of morning, been feeling run down as of late, though it's my own damn fault for not having breakfast. Which is why I can't wait for my Persona 3 toaster has yet to arrive (via gasp-theenemy)...

Had no idea that MAME can also emulate those crappy, Tiger handheld games; naturally there's not much to look at, since none of the background is part of the game's code (via lanceboyles)...

Eggman has a sense of humor (via voidirium)...

Eggman also has aesthetics (via posthumanwanderings)...

When you mess with the textures in Wind Waker for the sole purpose of making Vaporwave Link (via pmpkn)...

Man, I really wish each and every mech in Tech Romancer actually had its own anime (via ultrace)...

Before Mappy was a video game, it was a physical game involving real deal robots (via namcomuseum)...

And I swear, one of these days, we'll make available online Zac Gorman's print from Comics Vs Games 2...

In my time I've encountered lots & lots of BMO fan art, so much that it has become increasingly difficult to take notice and be impressed, yet this one managed to do so regardless (via it8bit)...

Let's all take a moment to appreciate the instruction manual for Cubivore, shall we (via skincoats)...

Cubivore's Japanese box art is also very nice (via gaygamer)...

An important message for all parents out there, concerning Minecraft (via reddit.com)...

When you can't afford the licensing fees for Miami Vice, Ghostbusters, Barbarella, I think... and maybe Logan's Run? (via mendelpalace)...

Given how Platoon ended up as a NES game, the idea of the Terminator on a Tiger handheld isn't totally far-fetched (via rewind01)...

And finally, PUT THAT CONTROLLER DOWN, NOW! (via fuzzyghost)

[supperfashion786]

Georgia Red Snapper - The Best of All Bottom Fishing

I've been Charter Fishing for many, lots years. As a Georgia Charter Fishing Guide running over 15 trips each season to Georgia's 40 Mile live beds (AKA Brunswick Snapper Banks) over the past 15 years, proves this 2009 spring season far better than era past for big (Mule) Red Snapper.

After an hour of the 4-stroke outboards humming on our 31 Contender, we approached the R-5 Navy Tower 34 miles off the beaches of St. Simons Island in coastal Georgia. We stopped in pretty close for a decoys sketch around the palace legs. Thousands of peanut cigar minnows surrounded the north castles legs allowing an easy bait-up for our crew, so we picked up 50 or so and pressed eastward toward the Snapper Banks.

Anyone who reads my articles knows I am a bottom fisherman of lots targets. After all the great bottom I have fished, this day would be different. Markings on the shouting space like I have never seen. The bottom literally "Blew up as we idled up to our aim and zeroed out. The entire personnel stared in astonishment at the color scope like we were possessed. A hidden snapshot shot would have been priceless as all of ourselves stood stared at the bottom machine with our mouths hanging open in dead silence. Finally, I broke the trance. "Man, this is gonna' be ugly!"

This target was on a 10-ft. ledge at the Brunswick Snapper Banks and for some wisdom this ledge always tends to hold more fish than any other in the domain and it's no mystery number. It's on any chart you plectrum up from the Georgia DNR. This intense marking rose 45 ft. off the bottom. It was textbook. The "fire motor red" marking stacked up high off the live bottom like this at a cheater angle into the current. Something any bottom fisherman seeks on any given fishery day.

After a scurrying rampage to get the rigs snapped on, we re-approached and positioned perfectly on summit of the marking in 117 ft., the first drop to the beds didn't quite type it. At about 100 ft., the Ugly Stik 30-60 Rod dumped over the gunwale and pinned our client to the stern of the Contender. "Fish On!" was about all he could manage to grunt as we all screamed for him to reel, reel, reel! Hold your rod up high! The seemingly long, but brutal fight produced a 30-inch Red Snapper for our first fellow of the day. What a beauty...

As I photographed the fellow and angler, another scream and shoes shuffling told me another Snapper had again pinned someone to the period of the boat. This round was won by an angler who boated a Gag Grouper approx 17 pounds after a furious wrestle on a lighter Rod that we had originally rigged for Vermilion Snapper. I don't know how the 3/0 light string hook didn't bend or intermission under the importance of the abyss water Grouper, but she held and the angler landed the fish.

I fish with my reels locked down almost as tight as the impediment will go. When you hook up with a big bottom fish, you don't lack any line to furlough your reel. Lock those impediment down tight, accordance your pole up high and hold on! It's you and him head to head, no drag.

After that Grouper, we decided we had better innovations out all the shaft rigged for Vermilion Snapper as the leader was 60 pound and the hooks were 3/0 medium. I didn't demand to income the openings of losing a large Mule or a giant Gag, so we rigged up with 100 pound mono guidance and larger hooks.

"A barrier of Georgia Red Snapper"

We had a legal barrier of Mule Red Snapper in shot lineup and I could tell my boy's finally had enough. We were releasing 30 inch fish by that point. Our team begged for those big Mule Snapper to quit biting! After a total of 18, the current changed and the Vermilion Snapper bite turned on. The crew were relieved as their punishment aptitude only half of what they had been with the Mules.

A limit of Vermilion Snapper was obviously not departing to be problem, but as each three pound "bee-liner" hit the deck, it got quieter, until finally my crew had enough of trapping fish that day. There is a brains of contentment when everyone agrees their firearms and back simply can't role properly enough to pin another fish! I don't see this as a problem. I see it as mission accomplished.....

You don't need any "special" numbers to stylus fish on Georgia's 40 - Mile Bottom. Go by the DNR office in Brunswick Georgia and choice up the public chart, or plectrum up the phone and give them a call. There are much of good numbers marking ledges and outcrops that are bringing plenty of large Red Snapper and Vermilion Snapper. This season has simply been a "stellar" year for bottom fishery and this rings true for Savannah Georgia and many other role on the East Coast according to reports from other Georgia Fishing Guides and Fishing Charter boats.

If you haven't been bottom fishery and you would like to learn, there are a few belongings you'll poverty to know about. First of all, the fellow obligation to be of legal size. Depending on what State you are in, it's usually 20 inches. Be sure and sketch your bag limit, too. In Georgia, it's (2) Red Snapper per Angler. Florida rules are different and seasons apply in certain area's as well.

The process of releasing center water beds fellow is critical. When releasing an undersized fellow or over the barricade fish, you must deflate the air bladder of the fellow to allow him a safe revenue to the bottom. Otherwise, he'll normally float on the surface and eventually die. There are small supplies referred to as "de-flators" or "vent tools". Learn where and how to vent beds fish properly for release. There are lots articles all across the internet about venting subroutine for beds fish.

"The Arsenal"

When you're pitching to big middle water fish, you poverty a big blades to crate with. There is no better bottom fishery pole than an Ugly Stik in my book. Here is my rig for Mules.

- Ugly Stik 30-60 or 40-80 Rod - Penn 4/0 High Speed Senator Reel loaded with 80 pound braided line. - 9/0 Redfishone Brand Circle Hook - 6 ft. of 100 pound Monofilament leader - 12 oz. Bank Lead - 90 Pound Snap Swivel

You can utility the same rod and reel for Vermilion Snapper but you resolve change your terminal tackle a bit. Use 60 pound mono leader and (2) 5/0 cwm hooks. Some anglers utility one hook rigs, me included, but if they're biting well and you're not on the entrance of being worn out, utility 2 hooks to crops numbers of fish.

If the fellow are finicky, we'll rig with a single 3/0 heterosexual hook so I tins actually batteries the hook instead of depending on the circle hook to do the situation for me. When it comes to hooks and their styles and sizing for each fish, it's personal fondness once you have learned the game, so choose your poison.

Your best bet for bait is live Spanish sardines, but lots anglers do not have the luxury of grasping 50 sardines before a trip. Frozen Sardines, Boston Mackerel and whole squid can all be purchased the day before your trip. Also, lots anglers use bucktail jigs and other lures to entice Snapper and Grouper to the hook.

For more about [ https://supperfashion.com/product-category/womens-fashion/bottoms-womens/ ] visit our site.

[easyfoodnetwork]

Our Food for the Many Rainy Days Ahead

Goa’s monsoon season has long necessitated the practice of purumenth, or stocking up. Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s a new kind of lifesaver.

We were the crow chasers.

Armed with rolled-up newspapers and sticks, we three siblings waited on the balcão (balcony) guarding the choris (Goan sausages) that were draped over a bamboo rod perched above the ground. Inside, the family sat on the floor mixing pork with local toddy vinegar, chiles, and spices, stuffing it into a casing of pigs’ intestines. A cotton thread tied off links, forming a meaty necklace dripping with fat and staining everything red.

These meat necklaces were our assignment, and they attracted crows by the dozen. The sausages hovered over freshly sourced chiles from different villages, solam (kokum), tamarind, mangoes, and fish, all spread on newspaper or mats woven from coconut palms. The salty aromas, mingled with the afternoon heat, proved irresistible to the birds. Fighting them off on hot summer days was our main source of entertainment during this long and tedious process, and we fought bravely.

These items, after all, were important — this was our purumenth, our food for the many rainy days ahead.

Purumenth (sometimes spelled purument or purmenth) is the local Konkani corruption of the Portuguese word provimento or provisão, meaning provisions. It is, most simply, the practice of stocking up for times when food is scarce.

Goa is a small state on India’s west coast. Ruled by the Portuguese from around 1510 until 1961, Goa today is known for being a popular travel destination thanks to its distinct cuisine, cultural diversity, cheap alcohol (tax rates on booze vary throughout India, and Goa has among the lowest), and beachy, laid-back life compared to cities like Mumbai and Delhi.

It’s also known for monsoons.

India’s monsoon season follows the hot, dry summer months of April and May and it lasts from June until September. The rain is fickle, alternating between light drizzles and heavy downpours that cause destructive flooding, limiting transportation and the mobility of goods and people — and, historically, making fresh ingredients like produce, meat, and fish scarce.

“Until a few decades back, provisions for the rains had to be gathered well in advance as the rains were unpredictable, weather forecasting was unknown, and refrigeration facilities non-existent,” writes historian Fátima da Silva Gracias in her book Cozinha de Goa: History and Tradition of Goan Food.

“The whole western coast would batten down the hatches before the monsoons came howling through.”

For decades, my family — like many others in villages across the state — would stock up for the harsh and volatile monsoon. Preparations began early, from mid-February onward. April and May, then, were months of abundance, of cheap goods and busyness. Food was procured, cleaned, sun-dried, pickled, and stored.

“The whole western coast would batten down the hatches before the monsoons came howling through,” says archaeologist and culinary anthropologist Kurush F. Dalal. “Everybody stocked things on a yearly basis — masala, dals and ghee, pickles, dry fish, salt, and pappad. It wasn’t frugality, but systematic planning to ensure the larder was always full.”

Everything had to be ready by mid-May in case of early showers. Those who were unable to prep in time by themselves could stock up at Purumentachem Fests held at the end of May and early June. These fairs were linked to the annual church feasts in the cities of Margao and Mapusa, which, since they occurred around time the monsoons began to sweep in, sold a variety of purumenth staples for last-minute shoppers.

For the most part, purumenth is the stuff of culinary history. Over the last few decades, the arrival of refrigerators to store produce, the availability of fresh goods throughout the monsoons, and increased mobility between villages and cities have made stocking up less crucial. Purumenth fairs still occur annually, and locals still stock up on dried fish, rice, vinegar and pickles, but lately they’ve been less driven by necessity than nostalgia — “preparing” less a practice than a memory, one looked upon fondly by the older generations.

But then COVID hit. On March 24, Goa, like the rest of India, went into a government-mandated lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19. The announcement was a surprise and ill-planned, leaving people with no time to prepare. In the initial days, people weren’t allowed to leave their homes; shops and markets were shuttered, and there was no public transportation. In many places, people started rationing meals as supplies started to run out. For the first time in a long time, food was hard to come by.

In the villages, elders nodded their heads wisely. It wasn’t the monsoon season yet, but they knew how to deal with this enforced isolation. They had been storing provisions for years and had a diminished but stocked larder. It was our younger generation that struggled, spoiled by abundance of choice and instant gratification, and living in homes where space is too premium to be utilized for storing goods.

“Our ancestors were smart enough to live by the seasons. But we’ve become greedy, and our demands have exceeded our supply,” says Avinash Martins, chef and owner of Cavatina Cucina. “Had we to follow our ancestral cycle, we wouldn’t have taken our food for granted.”

In the olden days, Goan kitchens had a cow dung-smattered floor and an earthen stove. On a bamboo rod placed high across the kitchen hung local white onions and sausages — the smoke from the fireplace kept the insects away — and most houses had a designated storage area, a secluded corner, the space under the bed or a dark room.

This space, while not exactly photogenic, offered a snapshot of summer bounty like cheap fresh fish, mangoes, jackfruit, chiles, and cashews. Here, too, lay all the dried, salted, and cured produce. There was kokum, tamarind balls, whole spices, masalas, and bhornis (porcelain jars) with pickles like chepne tor (flattened raw mangoes in brine). Some families had mitantulem mas — salted pork drained of its water via heavy weights and dried into a jerky of sorts. There was coconut oil and vinegar made from the toddy extracted from the coconut palms. Summer fruits like jackfruit and mangoes — including the seeds — were peeled, sliced, and dried for use in curries.

My family still lives in a small village in the north of Goa, in an old Indo-Portuguese house. Back in the 1930s and ’40s, the building had a separate room dedicated to rice. The bhathachim kudd (paddy room) was in the center of the house with no direct access to sunlight, keeping it cool and dark, and had a roughly hewn bamboo structure filled with paddy — rice with husk — from our fields.

“Preparing” has become less a practice than a memory, one looked upon fondly by the older generations.

“We dried the paddy in the sun to prevent insects from eating it, and parboiled it in a bhann [a big copper pot],” says Maryanne Lobo, an Ayurvedic doctor in Goa whose family also had a bhathachim kudd. “Once boiled, we took it to the mill to remove the bran, and stored the rice in a dhond [a barrel-like container].”

Lobo learned about purumenth from her maternal aunt. “She would store jackfruit seeds in a hole dug into the floor. She used the mud from an ant hill to create a well and covered the top with cow dung mixture. This kept the seeds dry and free from insects.” Dried jackfruit seeds were cooked like a vegetable, or added to curries.

Like her aunt, Lobo still stocks up religiously every summer. She doesn’t have a storeroom anymore, so the paddy is dried in her balcony, and she stores her jackfruit seeds in sand. The traditional jars have given way to plastic bottles, and provisions are stocked beneath beds — but still, she says “purumenth was a lifesaver” during the lockdown.

There’s something overwhelming and intoxicating about the smell of dried fish — fierce, pungent, and fermenting. Traditionally, in the monsoon months fishermen could not venture out into the choppy sea, so good fish was scarce. Locally caught fish from rivers and ponds was limited and expensive. People, then, preferred eating kharem (salted fish).

Goa’s typical dried fish stock includes the common mackerel, salted and dried and pickled to become a para with vinegar and masalas; dried shrimp; and prawns — pickled into a tangy molho or balchao, or dried. In the monsoon, this fish forms the accompaniments to a simple lunch of rice and plain curry, or to the mid-morning meal of pez (rice gruel). Dried shrimp becomes kismur — a dry salad made with coconut and tamarind, for which the prawns are roasted over a flame with coconut oil and the para is fried and roasted.

Fish was high on Marius Fernandes’s summer prep this year. Known as Goa’s “Festival Man” — responsible for conducting more than 40 cultural festivals in the region — Fernandes has dedicated his life to promoting the traditional Goan way of life. On lockdown in the small island village of Divar, he spent the summer doing prep under the guidance of his 88-year-old mother, Anna. The family dried and pickled prawns and mackerel, seeds, ripe and raw mangoes, jackfruit, pineapples, and tomatoes. “The situation with regards to sourcing fresh food is only going to get worse in this current situation,” says Fernandes, who has spent much of the last few months in the family garden. “We have to start thinking about growing our own food.”

Like Fernandes, the few who never stopped practicing purumenth are eloquent about its benefits. And those who are rediscovering it now, in response to COVID-19 shortages, are finding that it fits well into the modern ethos surrounding eating. “This is the new gourmet: food that is harvested locally, is seasonal, organic, grown in small batches, with a zero-carbon footprint,” says Cavatina Cucina’s Martins, who became more conscious about his food back in 2018 when the toxic chemical formalin was found in fish and led to a scare in Goa. Today he makes and stores pickles, fish, chiles, and salt.

“Because of the lockdown, we again know about all the wonderful produce available here,” says Fernandes. “Earlier, these would go to markets and supermarkets. Now, we are getting first pick of this locally grown, organic produce.”

Today, my larder in Mumbai has a few traces of purumenth: some salted shrimp and a pack of sausages. There have always been sausages in my kitchen, my way of connecting back to my home in Goa. There’s no need to fight off any crows, though — just my dog, who is equally fascinated by fragrant links of choris.

Joanna Lobo is a freelance journalist from India who enjoys writing about food and its ties to communities, her Goan heritage, and other things that make her happy. Roanna Fernandes is an illustrator from Mumbai.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2BRZe54 https://ift.tt/3ftPNq9

Goa’s monsoon season has long necessitated the practice of purumenth, or stocking up. Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s a new kind of lifesaver.

We were the crow chasers.

Armed with rolled-up newspapers and sticks, we three siblings waited on the balcão (balcony) guarding the choris (Goan sausages) that were draped over a bamboo rod perched above the ground. Inside, the family sat on the floor mixing pork with local toddy vinegar, chiles, and spices, stuffing it into a casing of pigs’ intestines. A cotton thread tied off links, forming a meaty necklace dripping with fat and staining everything red.

These meat necklaces were our assignment, and they attracted crows by the dozen. The sausages hovered over freshly sourced chiles from different villages, solam (kokum), tamarind, mangoes, and fish, all spread on newspaper or mats woven from coconut palms. The salty aromas, mingled with the afternoon heat, proved irresistible to the birds. Fighting them off on hot summer days was our main source of entertainment during this long and tedious process, and we fought bravely.

These items, after all, were important — this was our purumenth, our food for the many rainy days ahead.

Purumenth (sometimes spelled purument or purmenth) is the local Konkani corruption of the Portuguese word provimento or provisão, meaning provisions. It is, most simply, the practice of stocking up for times when food is scarce.

Goa is a small state on India’s west coast. Ruled by the Portuguese from around 1510 until 1961, Goa today is known for being a popular travel destination thanks to its distinct cuisine, cultural diversity, cheap alcohol (tax rates on booze vary throughout India, and Goa has among the lowest), and beachy, laid-back life compared to cities like Mumbai and Delhi.

It’s also known for monsoons.

India’s monsoon season follows the hot, dry summer months of April and May and it lasts from June until September. The rain is fickle, alternating between light drizzles and heavy downpours that cause destructive flooding, limiting transportation and the mobility of goods and people — and, historically, making fresh ingredients like produce, meat, and fish scarce.

“Until a few decades back, provisions for the rains had to be gathered well in advance as the rains were unpredictable, weather forecasting was unknown, and refrigeration facilities non-existent,” writes historian Fátima da Silva Gracias in her book Cozinha de Goa: History and Tradition of Goan Food.

“The whole western coast would batten down the hatches before the monsoons came howling through.”

For decades, my family — like many others in villages across the state — would stock up for the harsh and volatile monsoon. Preparations began early, from mid-February onward. April and May, then, were months of abundance, of cheap goods and busyness. Food was procured, cleaned, sun-dried, pickled, and stored.

“The whole western coast would batten down the hatches before the monsoons came howling through,” says archaeologist and culinary anthropologist Kurush F. Dalal. “Everybody stocked things on a yearly basis — masala, dals and ghee, pickles, dry fish, salt, and pappad. It wasn’t frugality, but systematic planning to ensure the larder was always full.”

Everything had to be ready by mid-May in case of early showers. Those who were unable to prep in time by themselves could stock up at Purumentachem Fests held at the end of May and early June. These fairs were linked to the annual church feasts in the cities of Margao and Mapusa, which, since they occurred around time the monsoons began to sweep in, sold a variety of purumenth staples for last-minute shoppers.

For the most part, purumenth is the stuff of culinary history. Over the last few decades, the arrival of refrigerators to store produce, the availability of fresh goods throughout the monsoons, and increased mobility between villages and cities have made stocking up less crucial. Purumenth fairs still occur annually, and locals still stock up on dried fish, rice, vinegar and pickles, but lately they’ve been less driven by necessity than nostalgia — “preparing” less a practice than a memory, one looked upon fondly by the older generations.

But then COVID hit. On March 24, Goa, like the rest of India, went into a government-mandated lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19. The announcement was a surprise and ill-planned, leaving people with no time to prepare. In the initial days, people weren’t allowed to leave their homes; shops and markets were shuttered, and there was no public transportation. In many places, people started rationing meals as supplies started to run out. For the first time in a long time, food was hard to come by.

In the villages, elders nodded their heads wisely. It wasn’t the monsoon season yet, but they knew how to deal with this enforced isolation. They had been storing provisions for years and had a diminished but stocked larder. It was our younger generation that struggled, spoiled by abundance of choice and instant gratification, and living in homes where space is too premium to be utilized for storing goods.

“Our ancestors were smart enough to live by the seasons. But we’ve become greedy, and our demands have exceeded our supply,” says Avinash Martins, chef and owner of Cavatina Cucina. “Had we to follow our ancestral cycle, we wouldn’t have taken our food for granted.”

In the olden days, Goan kitchens had a cow dung-smattered floor and an earthen stove. On a bamboo rod placed high across the kitchen hung local white onions and sausages — the smoke from the fireplace kept the insects away — and most houses had a designated storage area, a secluded corner, the space under the bed or a dark room.

This space, while not exactly photogenic, offered a snapshot of summer bounty like cheap fresh fish, mangoes, jackfruit, chiles, and cashews. Here, too, lay all the dried, salted, and cured produce. There was kokum, tamarind balls, whole spices, masalas, and bhornis (porcelain jars) with pickles like chepne tor (flattened raw mangoes in brine). Some families had mitantulem mas — salted pork drained of its water via heavy weights and dried into a jerky of sorts. There was coconut oil and vinegar made from the toddy extracted from the coconut palms. Summer fruits like jackfruit and mangoes — including the seeds — were peeled, sliced, and dried for use in curries.

My family still lives in a small village in the north of Goa, in an old Indo-Portuguese house. Back in the 1930s and ’40s, the building had a separate room dedicated to rice. The bhathachim kudd (paddy room) was in the center of the house with no direct access to sunlight, keeping it cool and dark, and had a roughly hewn bamboo structure filled with paddy — rice with husk — from our fields.

“Preparing” has become less a practice than a memory, one looked upon fondly by the older generations.

“We dried the paddy in the sun to prevent insects from eating it, and parboiled it in a bhann [a big copper pot],” says Maryanne Lobo, an Ayurvedic doctor in Goa whose family also had a bhathachim kudd. “Once boiled, we took it to the mill to remove the bran, and stored the rice in a dhond [a barrel-like container].”

Lobo learned about purumenth from her maternal aunt. “She would store jackfruit seeds in a hole dug into the floor. She used the mud from an ant hill to create a well and covered the top with cow dung mixture. This kept the seeds dry and free from insects.” Dried jackfruit seeds were cooked like a vegetable, or added to curries.

Like her aunt, Lobo still stocks up religiously every summer. She doesn’t have a storeroom anymore, so the paddy is dried in her balcony, and she stores her jackfruit seeds in sand. The traditional jars have given way to plastic bottles, and provisions are stocked beneath beds — but still, she says “purumenth was a lifesaver” during the lockdown.

There’s something overwhelming and intoxicating about the smell of dried fish — fierce, pungent, and fermenting. Traditionally, in the monsoon months fishermen could not venture out into the choppy sea, so good fish was scarce. Locally caught fish from rivers and ponds was limited and expensive. People, then, preferred eating kharem (salted fish).

Goa’s typical dried fish stock includes the common mackerel, salted and dried and pickled to become a para with vinegar and masalas; dried shrimp; and prawns — pickled into a tangy molho or balchao, or dried. In the monsoon, this fish forms the accompaniments to a simple lunch of rice and plain curry, or to the mid-morning meal of pez (rice gruel). Dried shrimp becomes kismur — a dry salad made with coconut and tamarind, for which the prawns are roasted over a flame with coconut oil and the para is fried and roasted.

Fish was high on Marius Fernandes’s summer prep this year. Known as Goa’s “Festival Man” — responsible for conducting more than 40 cultural festivals in the region — Fernandes has dedicated his life to promoting the traditional Goan way of life. On lockdown in the small island village of Divar, he spent the summer doing prep under the guidance of his 88-year-old mother, Anna. The family dried and pickled prawns and mackerel, seeds, ripe and raw mangoes, jackfruit, pineapples, and tomatoes. “The situation with regards to sourcing fresh food is only going to get worse in this current situation,” says Fernandes, who has spent much of the last few months in the family garden. “We have to start thinking about growing our own food.”

Like Fernandes, the few who never stopped practicing purumenth are eloquent about its benefits. And those who are rediscovering it now, in response to COVID-19 shortages, are finding that it fits well into the modern ethos surrounding eating. “This is the new gourmet: food that is harvested locally, is seasonal, organic, grown in small batches, with a zero-carbon footprint,” says Cavatina Cucina’s Martins, who became more conscious about his food back in 2018 when the toxic chemical formalin was found in fish and led to a scare in Goa. Today he makes and stores pickles, fish, chiles, and salt.

“Because of the lockdown, we again know about all the wonderful produce available here,” says Fernandes. “Earlier, these would go to markets and supermarkets. Now, we are getting first pick of this locally grown, organic produce.”

Today, my larder in Mumbai has a few traces of purumenth: some salted shrimp and a pack of sausages. There have always been sausages in my kitchen, my way of connecting back to my home in Goa. There’s no need to fight off any crows, though — just my dog, who is equally fascinated by fragrant links of choris.

Joanna Lobo is a freelance journalist from India who enjoys writing about food and its ties to communities, her Goan heritage, and other things that make her happy. Roanna Fernandes is an illustrator from Mumbai.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2BRZe54 via Blogger https://ift.tt/2D6Q5Xe

[sos-amchespin-sendhelp]

SNAPSHOTS FROM ZERO ISLE CENTER NO. 1

WE ARE IN OVER OUR FUCKING HEADS WHY DID ANYONE THINK THIS WAS A GOOD PLACE TO GET GROCERIES

EVEN IF WE DID GET A HAUL ARE WE SUPPOSED TO JUST CARRY THE FOOD BACK; THE CARAVANS A FOUR DAY TREK

ANYONE KNOW HOW TO APPLY A TOURNIQUET?

[statusreview]

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances

I’d like to say we strategically planned to buy all of our beach house appliances (besides the pink stove, that is) during Black Friday sale season. But really, it was just some lucky timing. Timing so lucky that it saved us over $1350, in fact! The appliances won’t arrive until after Thanksgiving, but in case you wanted to snag some of the same deals, we’re sharing what we chose, how we saved, and why a last-minute floor plan change helped us get even more for less.

sconces / counters / cabinets / pendants / hood / stove / walls: SW White Heron / trim: SW Stone Isle

Let’s first talk about our change of plans. If you remember this post about planning our kitchen, we had been thinking about purchasing this fridge to go along the same wall as the stove. There were very few white fridges that fit the small area we had, so it was almost a given – but our gut told us to wait on purchasing it until the kitchen started to come together more.

It’s a good thing we did because as we started building cabinets, Sherry’s biggest fear about that fridge started to materialize, thanks to this cardboard mockup that we made out of our island stool boxes (I’m pretty sure if Serena & Lily made a refrigerator though, Sherry would want it – It’d probably be all inlay or capiz).

Anyways, the issue is hard to see in the photo above. Sure, it cramps the door molding a bit more than we’d like, but our main gripe was that it was such an obnoxious visual obstruction from this other view below – which would be seen every single time anyone walks into the room from the living room or the foyer. I’m sure part of the problem is that we’ve just grown accustomed to how open everything has been for months, but we (especially Sherry, who jokes that her tombstone could someday read “Lover Of Balance And Sight Lines”) weren’t loving how the future fridge would encroach on the view of the back door and the door to breakfast nook.

We considered moving the fridge to the back wall between the two doorways, but it was even more cramped looking back here. Sidenote: the plumber included a water line in his standard package, even though the fridge we were planning to buy didn’t have an ice maker, so that’s why you see that there. 

So after much debate, we came to the conclusion that we shared in our last update: we’re gonna turn the breakfast nook into a walk-in pantry, and the fridge will go in there.

It’s hard to tell in photos, but you can kinda see in this one from a few weeks ago (before we had the light fixture correctly centered) that it would be a somewhat cramped breakfast nook. Even with just a placeholder table and chairs, it wasn’t very comfortable to move around in. Plus, with seating for 4 people at the island and 6-8 people at the dining table, it was starting to feel like overkill (keep in mind that this house will most likely sleep 8 people, and we’ll have already seating for 12 people without a breakfast nook).

The decision to turn that nook into a pantry immediately felt like a HUGE functional improvement to the first floor. We’ll have plenty more space for the dry goods that people bring to the beach (cereal boxes, bags of chips, those comically large barrels of pretzels, etc) plus we gain a spot for people to store their coolers. We’re also debating moving the microwave in there instead of having it in the island, which earns us one more deep drawer in the kitchen for more storage (we only have 8 kitchen cabinets, so we want to make the most of them). Plus we can fit a larger fridge in there too. All good things!

But I still was pretty insistent on using that sliver of wall space for refrigerating frequently used items. This means things like milk, OJ, eggs, etc can be within reach of the prep areas while the full-sized fridge will be just a few steps away in the pantry. That idea led us to this vintage-inspired mini-fridge from Amazon that jives well with our stove AND won’t visually interfere with any sight lines. Plus, it was MUCH cheaper than a lot of the other retro style fridges out there.

It arrived last week so we got to plug it in and everything (I had an ice cold Coke and it was glorious – sayonara Aquatober!). Don’t mind the big black hole in the wall below. We had to move the old fridge outlet lower to be hidden by the smaller fridge, so we still need to patch that. And of course baseboards are missing on both sides, so it’ll look a lot more finished eventually (still need to add a backsplash and our open shelves too).

But now let’s talk about the rest of the appliances. We still needed a washer & dryer for the mudroom, a dishwasher for the island, and that larger fridge for the pantry.  So we hit up Home Depot last week to hunt down some early Black Friday deals (oddly enough a ton of them are running already). We quickly zeroed in on this Maytag Bravos XL top-loading washer and electric dryer set.

Picking these was easy for a few reasons:

We have plenty of room for a standard side-by-side washer and dryer set in the beach house mudroom, so we didn’t have to hunt down some weird size or finish.

We have basically the same models in our own laundry room (ours are older and slightly smaller) and we’ve been VERY happy with them.

They were super marked down! Both originally $899, but on “Special Buy” for $599 each.

We actually got HIGHER CAPACITY laundry appliances than what we have here at home for LESS MONEY (those were $799 marked down to $651). We figure the extra room (about 1 cubic foot each) will be helpful at a beach house since they’ll mainly be used for towels and bedding.

The dishwasher was a little more challenging to select because we wanted white (so it would blend in with the cabinets, leaving the pink stove as the only accent). But oddly enough, these days stainless steel is easier to come by and in some cases – including ours – the white was actually a bit more expensive than the stainless steel version, which still shocks me.

We landed on this Frigidaire Gallery dishwasher since we had a similar Frigidaire Gallery one in our last house. We liked the inconspicuous top-controls and the blends-right-in white toekick on this model (often those are black). It was $499 at Home Depot, but I realized in writing this post that it was $50 cheaper at both Lowe’s and Best Buy, so on our way out to the beach house this weekend, I ran into Home Depot and they price adjusted it to match, so we got it for $449!

Finding a fridge was the toughest part. The breakfast nook-turned-pantry is still a challenging room for a fridge because of the windows & doorway. Basically, we don’t have any wall that can accommodate a fridge any deeper than 28″ (most counter-depth fridges start around 30″). But after some hunting, we stumbled upon this “apartment-sized” refrigerator by Haier. We’d never heard of the brand, but it’s made by GE and has really good reviews. One person even said something like “we got this for our beach house and love it!” Pretty sure that’s a sign. Since it’s not going in the main kitchen area, we don’t mind that it’s not white. Plus, it’s marked down OVER $500, so a $1,200 fridge could be ours for $698!

The last bit of savings came from a special deal that Home Depot was running based on how many appliances you buy at a time. Basically, if you buy 2 appliances you save $50; if you buy 3 appliances you save $100; if you buy 4 appliances you save $200 (that’s us!), etc. And FYI, Lowe’s is running a nearly identical promotion this month. The only difference I can see is you get the money back in gift cards, not cash.

So for anyone who lost track along the way (which includes me), here’s a quick snapshot of what we got (fridge / washer / dryer / dishwasher) and what we saved:

$2,150 is still a big old chunk of change to drop (and that doesn’t include the pink stove, mini fridge, or microwave) but we feel really good about our final selections being brands we’ve already purchased and loved, or machines that have great ratings and should totally do the job for us (we’re looking at you, fridge!).

Oh, and speaking of spending money on things that are super functional but not always glamorous, we also hung blinds throughout the entire beach house on Saturday. They’re cordless white faux wood blinds (also from Home Depot – I was getting them cut while Sherry finalized our appliance checkout).

 vanity / stool / towel / art / light / walls: SW White Heron / mirror: HomeGoods

They’re similar to the ones we installed here at home, except that they’re cordless (safer for young renters, plus they look even cleaner without those cords hanging down) so they just raise and lower just by pulling on the bottom. I can’t tell you how nice it was to shower in the bathroom for the first time without my “modesty cardboard” shoved in the windows.

floor tile / floor accent tile / marble table / tub color: SW Riverway / walls: SW White Heron

Quick tip for installing a boatload of blinds (we had 29 windows): tag team with one person unpacking and prepping them (snapping the rod in, removing the protective cardboard, etc) and the other person drilling and hanging. I also pre-drilled holes everywhere first so I wasn’t losing time switching my drill bits back-and-forth each time. It still took us about 3 hours, but it could’ve been much worse.

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We’ll give you guys an update after the appliances arrive next week, since we also owe you more about our other big plan-change in the kitchen.

P.S. To read more about how we restored this beach house over the last year, here are all the previous posts about everything from sharing the before shots and floor planning to getting drywall and mad-dash tiling three bathrooms. It’s been quite the ride, guys. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances appeared first on Young House Love.

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances published first on http://ift.tt/2r6hzQy

[truereviewpage]

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances

I’d like to say we strategically planned to buy all of our beach house appliances (besides the pink stove, that is) during Black Friday sale season. But really, it was just some lucky timing. Timing so lucky that it saved us over $1350, in fact! The appliances won’t arrive until after Thanksgiving, but in case you wanted to snag some of the same deals, we’re sharing what we chose, how we saved, and why a last-minute floor plan change helped us get even more for less.

sconces / counters / cabinets / pendants / hood / stove / walls: SW White Heron / trim: SW Stone Isle

Let’s first talk about our change of plans. If you remember this post about planning our kitchen, we had been thinking about purchasing this fridge to go along the same wall as the stove. There were very few white fridges that fit the small area we had, so it was almost a given – but our gut told us to wait on purchasing it until the kitchen started to come together more.

It’s a good thing we did because as we started building cabinets, Sherry’s biggest fear about that fridge started to materialize, thanks to this cardboard mockup that we made out of our island stool boxes (I’m pretty sure if Serena & Lily made a refrigerator though, Sherry would want it – It’d probably be all inlay or capiz).

Anyways, the issue is hard to see in the photo above. Sure, it cramps the door molding a bit more than we’d like, but our main gripe was that it was such an obnoxious visual obstruction from this other view below – which would be seen every single time anyone walks into the room from the living room or the foyer. I’m sure part of the problem is that we’ve just grown accustomed to how open everything has been for months, but we (especially Sherry, who jokes that her tombstone could someday read “Lover Of Balance And Sight Lines”) weren’t loving how the future fridge would encroach on the view of the back door and the door to breakfast nook.

We considered moving the fridge to the back wall between the two doorways, but it was even more cramped looking back here. Sidenote: the plumber included a water line in his standard package, even though the fridge we were planning to buy didn’t have an ice maker, so that’s why you see that there. 

So after much debate, we came to the conclusion that we shared in our last update: we’re gonna turn the breakfast nook into a walk-in pantry, and the fridge will go in there.

It’s hard to tell in photos, but you can kinda see in this one from a few weeks ago (before we had the light fixture correctly centered) that it would be a somewhat cramped breakfast nook. Even with just a placeholder table and chairs, it wasn’t very comfortable to move around in. Plus, with seating for 4 people at the island and 6-8 people at the dining table, it was starting to feel like overkill (keep in mind that this house will most likely sleep 8 people, and we’ll have already seating for 12 people without a breakfast nook).

The decision to turn that nook into a pantry immediately felt like a HUGE functional improvement to the first floor. We’ll have plenty more space for the dry goods that people bring to the beach (cereal boxes, bags of chips, those comically large barrels of pretzels, etc) plus we gain a spot for people to store their coolers. We’re also debating moving the microwave in there instead of having it in the island, which earns us one more deep drawer in the kitchen for more storage (we only have 8 kitchen cabinets, so we want to make the most of them). Plus we can fit a larger fridge in there too. All good things!

But I still was pretty insistent on using that sliver of wall space for refrigerating frequently used items. This means things like milk, OJ, eggs, etc can be within reach of the prep areas while the full-sized fridge will be just a few steps away in the pantry. That idea led us to this vintage-inspired mini-fridge from Amazon that jives well with our stove AND won’t visually interfere with any sight lines. Plus, it was MUCH cheaper than a lot of the other retro style fridges out there.

It arrived last week so we got to plug it in and everything (I had an ice cold Coke and it was glorious – sayonara Aquatober!). Don’t mind the big black hole in the wall below. We had to move the old fridge outlet lower to be hidden by the smaller fridge, so we still need to patch that. And of course baseboards are missing on both sides, so it’ll look a lot more finished eventually (still need to add a backsplash and our open shelves too).

But now let’s talk about the rest of the appliances. We still needed a washer & dryer for the mudroom, a dishwasher for the island, and that larger fridge for the pantry.  So we hit up Home Depot last week to hunt down some early Black Friday deals (oddly enough a ton of them are running already). We quickly zeroed in on this Maytag Bravos XL top-loading washer and electric dryer set.

Picking these was easy for a few reasons:

We have plenty of room for a standard side-by-side washer and dryer set in the beach house mudroom, so we didn’t have to hunt down some weird size or finish.

We have basically the same models in our own laundry room (ours are older and slightly smaller) and we’ve been VERY happy with them.

They were super marked down! Both originally $899, but on “Special Buy” for $599 each.

We actually got HIGHER CAPACITY laundry appliances than what we have here at home for LESS MONEY (those were $799 marked down to $651). We figure the extra room (about 1 cubic foot each) will be helpful at a beach house since they’ll mainly be used for towels and bedding.

The dishwasher was a little more challenging to select because we wanted white (so it would blend in with the cabinets, leaving the pink stove as the only accent). But oddly enough, these days stainless steel is easier to come by and in some cases – including ours – the white was actually a bit more expensive than the stainless steel version, which still shocks me.

We landed on this Frigidaire Gallery dishwasher since we had a similar Frigidaire Gallery one in our last house. We liked the inconspicuous top-controls and the blends-right-in white toekick on this model (often those are black). It was $499 at Home Depot, but I realized in writing this post that it was $50 cheaper at both Lowe’s and Best Buy, so on our way out to the beach house this weekend, I ran into Home Depot and they price adjusted it to match, so we got it for $449!

Finding a fridge was the toughest part. The breakfast nook-turned-pantry is still a challenging room for a fridge because of the windows & doorway. Basically, we don’t have any wall that can accommodate a fridge any deeper than 28″ (most counter-depth fridges start around 30″). But after some hunting, we stumbled upon this “apartment-sized” refrigerator by Haier. We’d never heard of the brand, but it’s made by GE and has really good reviews. One person even said something like “we got this for our beach house and love it!” Pretty sure that’s a sign. Since it’s not going in the main kitchen area, we don’t mind that it’s not white. Plus, it’s marked down OVER $500, so a $1,200 fridge could be ours for $698!

The last bit of savings came from a special deal that Home Depot was running based on how many appliances you buy at a time. Basically, if you buy 2 appliances you save $50; if you buy 3 appliances you save $100; if you buy 4 appliances you save $200 (that’s us!), etc. And FYI, Lowe’s is running a nearly identical promotion this month. The only difference I can see is you get the money back in gift cards, not cash.

So for anyone who lost track along the way (which includes me), here’s a quick snapshot of what we got (fridge / washer / dryer / dishwasher) and what we saved:

$2,150 is still a big old chunk of change to drop (and that doesn’t include the pink stove, mini fridge, or microwave) but we feel really good about our final selections being brands we’ve already purchased and loved, or machines that have great ratings and should totally do the job for us (we’re looking at you, fridge!).

Oh, and speaking of spending money on things that are super functional but not always glamorous, we also hung blinds throughout the entire beach house on Saturday. They’re cordless white faux wood blinds (also from Home Depot – I was getting them cut while Sherry finalized our appliance checkout).

 vanity / stool / towel / art / light / walls: SW White Heron / mirror: HomeGoods

They’re similar to the ones we installed here at home, except that they’re cordless (safer for young renters, plus they look even cleaner without those cords hanging down) so they just raise and lower just by pulling on the bottom. I can’t tell you how nice it was to shower in the bathroom for the first time without my “modesty cardboard” shoved in the windows.

floor tile / floor accent tile / marble table / tub color: SW Riverway / walls: SW White Heron

Quick tip for installing a boatload of blinds (we had 29 windows): tag team with one person unpacking and prepping them (snapping the rod in, removing the protective cardboard, etc) and the other person drilling and hanging. I also pre-drilled holes everywhere first so I wasn’t losing time switching my drill bits back-and-forth each time. It still took us about 3 hours, but it could’ve been much worse.

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We’ll give you guys an update after the appliances arrive next week, since we also owe you more about our other big plan-change in the kitchen.

P.S. To read more about how we restored this beach house over the last year, here are all the previous posts about everything from sharing the before shots and floor planning to getting drywall and mad-dash tiling three bathrooms. It’s been quite the ride, guys. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances appeared first on Young House Love.

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances published first on http://ift.tt/2qCHnUt

[easyfoodnetwork]

Goa’s monsoon season has long necessitated the practice of purumenth, or stocking up. Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s a new kind of lifesaver. We were the crow chasers. Armed with rolled-up newspapers and sticks, we three siblings waited on the balcão (balcony) guarding the choris (Goan sausages) that were draped over a bamboo rod perched above the ground. Inside, the family sat on the floor mixing pork with local toddy vinegar, chiles, and spices, stuffing it into a casing of pigs’ intestines. A cotton thread tied off links, forming a meaty necklace dripping with fat and staining everything red. These meat necklaces were our assignment, and they attracted crows by the dozen. The sausages hovered over freshly sourced chiles from different villages, solam (kokum), tamarind, mangoes, and fish, all spread on newspaper or mats woven from coconut palms. The salty aromas, mingled with the afternoon heat, proved irresistible to the birds. Fighting them off on hot summer days was our main source of entertainment during this long and tedious process, and we fought bravely. These items, after all, were important — this was our purumenth, our food for the many rainy days ahead. Purumenth (sometimes spelled purument or purmenth) is the local Konkani corruption of the Portuguese word provimento or provisão, meaning provisions. It is, most simply, the practice of stocking up for times when food is scarce. Goa is a small state on India’s west coast. Ruled by the Portuguese from around 1510 until 1961, Goa today is known for being a popular travel destination thanks to its distinct cuisine, cultural diversity, cheap alcohol (tax rates on booze vary throughout India, and Goa has among the lowest), and beachy, laid-back life compared to cities like Mumbai and Delhi. It’s also known for monsoons. India’s monsoon season follows the hot, dry summer months of April and May and it lasts from June until September. The rain is fickle, alternating between light drizzles and heavy downpours that cause destructive flooding, limiting transportation and the mobility of goods and people — and, historically, making fresh ingredients like produce, meat, and fish scarce. “Until a few decades back, provisions for the rains had to be gathered well in advance as the rains were unpredictable, weather forecasting was unknown, and refrigeration facilities non-existent,” writes historian Fátima da Silva Gracias in her book Cozinha de Goa: History and Tradition of Goan Food. “The whole western coast would batten down the hatches before the monsoons came howling through.” For decades, my family — like many others in villages across the state — would stock up for the harsh and volatile monsoon. Preparations began early, from mid-February onward. April and May, then, were months of abundance, of cheap goods and busyness. Food was procured, cleaned, sun-dried, pickled, and stored. “The whole western coast would batten down the hatches before the monsoons came howling through,” says archaeologist and culinary anthropologist Kurush F. Dalal. “Everybody stocked things on a yearly basis — masala, dals and ghee, pickles, dry fish, salt, and pappad. It wasn’t frugality, but systematic planning to ensure the larder was always full.” Everything had to be ready by mid-May in case of early showers. Those who were unable to prep in time by themselves could stock up at Purumentachem Fests held at the end of May and early June. These fairs were linked to the annual church feasts in the cities of Margao and Mapusa, which, since they occurred around time the monsoons began to sweep in, sold a variety of purumenth staples for last-minute shoppers. For the most part, purumenth is the stuff of culinary history. Over the last few decades, the arrival of refrigerators to store produce, the availability of fresh goods throughout the monsoons, and increased mobility between villages and cities have made stocking up less crucial. Purumenth fairs still occur annually, and locals still stock up on dried fish, rice, vinegar and pickles, but lately they’ve been less driven by necessity than nostalgia — “preparing” less a practice than a memory, one looked upon fondly by the older generations. But then COVID hit. On March 24, Goa, like the rest of India, went into a government-mandated lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19. The announcement was a surprise and ill-planned, leaving people with no time to prepare. In the initial days, people weren’t allowed to leave their homes; shops and markets were shuttered, and there was no public transportation. In many places, people started rationing meals as supplies started to run out. For the first time in a long time, food was hard to come by. In the villages, elders nodded their heads wisely. It wasn’t the monsoon season yet, but they knew how to deal with this enforced isolation. They had been storing provisions for years and had a diminished but stocked larder. It was our younger generation that struggled, spoiled by abundance of choice and instant gratification, and living in homes where space is too premium to be utilized for storing goods. “Our ancestors were smart enough to live by the seasons. But we’ve become greedy, and our demands have exceeded our supply,” says Avinash Martins, chef and owner of Cavatina Cucina. “Had we to follow our ancestral cycle, we wouldn’t have taken our food for granted.” In the olden days, Goan kitchens had a cow dung-smattered floor and an earthen stove. On a bamboo rod placed high across the kitchen hung local white onions and sausages — the smoke from the fireplace kept the insects away — and most houses had a designated storage area, a secluded corner, the space under the bed or a dark room. This space, while not exactly photogenic, offered a snapshot of summer bounty like cheap fresh fish, mangoes, jackfruit, chiles, and cashews. Here, too, lay all the dried, salted, and cured produce. There was kokum, tamarind balls, whole spices, masalas, and bhornis (porcelain jars) with pickles like chepne tor (flattened raw mangoes in brine). Some families had mitantulem mas — salted pork drained of its water via heavy weights and dried into a jerky of sorts. There was coconut oil and vinegar made from the toddy extracted from the coconut palms. Summer fruits like jackfruit and mangoes — including the seeds — were peeled, sliced, and dried for use in curries. My family still lives in a small village in the north of Goa, in an old Indo-Portuguese house. Back in the 1930s and ’40s, the building had a separate room dedicated to rice. The bhathachim kudd (paddy room) was in the center of the house with no direct access to sunlight, keeping it cool and dark, and had a roughly hewn bamboo structure filled with paddy — rice with husk — from our fields. “Preparing” has become less a practice than a memory, one looked upon fondly by the older generations. “We dried the paddy in the sun to prevent insects from eating it, and parboiled it in a bhann [a big copper pot],” says Maryanne Lobo, an Ayurvedic doctor in Goa whose family also had a bhathachim kudd. “Once boiled, we took it to the mill to remove the bran, and stored the rice in a dhond [a barrel-like container].” Lobo learned about purumenth from her maternal aunt. “She would store jackfruit seeds in a hole dug into the floor. She used the mud from an ant hill to create a well and covered the top with cow dung mixture. This kept the seeds dry and free from insects.” Dried jackfruit seeds were cooked like a vegetable, or added to curries. Like her aunt, Lobo still stocks up religiously every summer. She doesn’t have a storeroom anymore, so the paddy is dried in her balcony, and she stores her jackfruit seeds in sand. The traditional jars have given way to plastic bottles, and provisions are stocked beneath beds — but still, she says “purumenth was a lifesaver” during the lockdown. There’s something overwhelming and intoxicating about the smell of dried fish — fierce, pungent, and fermenting. Traditionally, in the monsoon months fishermen could not venture out into the choppy sea, so good fish was scarce. Locally caught fish from rivers and ponds was limited and expensive. People, then, preferred eating kharem (salted fish). Goa’s typical dried fish stock includes the common mackerel, salted and dried and pickled to become a para with vinegar and masalas; dried shrimp; and prawns — pickled into a tangy molho or balchao, or dried. In the monsoon, this fish forms the accompaniments to a simple lunch of rice and plain curry, or to the mid-morning meal of pez (rice gruel). Dried shrimp becomes kismur — a dry salad made with coconut and tamarind, for which the prawns are roasted over a flame with coconut oil and the para is fried and roasted. Fish was high on Marius Fernandes’s summer prep this year. Known as Goa’s “Festival Man” — responsible for conducting more than 40 cultural festivals in the region — Fernandes has dedicated his life to promoting the traditional Goan way of life. On lockdown in the small island village of Divar, he spent the summer doing prep under the guidance of his 88-year-old mother, Anna. The family dried and pickled prawns and mackerel, seeds, ripe and raw mangoes, jackfruit, pineapples, and tomatoes. “The situation with regards to sourcing fresh food is only going to get worse in this current situation,” says Fernandes, who has spent much of the last few months in the family garden. “We have to start thinking about growing our own food.” Like Fernandes, the few who never stopped practicing purumenth are eloquent about its benefits. And those who are rediscovering it now, in response to COVID-19 shortages, are finding that it fits well into the modern ethos surrounding eating. “This is the new gourmet: food that is harvested locally, is seasonal, organic, grown in small batches, with a zero-carbon footprint,” says Cavatina Cucina’s Martins, who became more conscious about his food back in 2018 when the toxic chemical formalin was found in fish and led to a scare in Goa. Today he makes and stores pickles, fish, chiles, and salt. “Because of the lockdown, we again know about all the wonderful produce available here,” says Fernandes. “Earlier, these would go to markets and supermarkets. Now, we are getting first pick of this locally grown, organic produce.” Today, my larder in Mumbai has a few traces of purumenth: some salted shrimp and a pack of sausages. There have always been sausages in my kitchen, my way of connecting back to my home in Goa. There’s no need to fight off any crows, though — just my dog, who is equally fascinated by fragrant links of choris. Joanna Lobo is a freelance journalist from India who enjoys writing about food and its ties to communities, her Goan heritage, and other things that make her happy. Roanna Fernandes is an illustrator from Mumbai. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2BRZe54

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/08/our-food-for-many-rainy-days-ahead.html

[endlessarchite]

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances

I’d like to say we strategically planned to buy all of our beach house appliances (besides the pink stove, that is) during Black Friday sale season. But really, it was just some lucky timing. Timing so lucky that it saved us over $1350, in fact! The appliances won’t arrive until after Thanksgiving, but in case you wanted to snag some of the same deals, we’re sharing what we chose, how we saved, and why a last-minute floor plan change helped us get even more for less.

sconces / counters / cabinets / pendants / hood / stove / walls: SW White Heron / trim: SW Stone Isle

Let’s first talk about our change of plans. If you remember this post about planning our kitchen, we had been thinking about purchasing this fridge to go along the same wall as the stove. There were very few white fridges that fit the small area we had, so it was almost a given – but our gut told us to wait on purchasing it until the kitchen started to come together more.

It’s a good thing we did because as we started building cabinets, Sherry’s biggest fear about that fridge started to materialize, thanks to this cardboard mockup that we made out of our island stool boxes (I’m pretty sure if Serena & Lily made a refrigerator though, Sherry would want it – It’d probably be all inlay or capiz).

Anyways, the issue is hard to see in the photo above. Sure, it cramps the door molding a bit more than we’d like, but our main gripe was that it was such an obnoxious visual obstruction from this other view below – which would be seen every single time anyone walks into the room from the living room or the foyer. I’m sure part of the problem is that we’ve just grown accustomed to how open everything has been for months, but we (especially Sherry, who jokes that her tombstone could someday read “Lover Of Balance And Sight Lines”) weren’t loving how the future fridge would encroach on the view of the back door and the door to breakfast nook.

We considered moving the fridge to the back wall between the two doorways, but it was even more cramped looking back here. Sidenote: the plumber included a water line in his standard package, even though the fridge we were planning to buy didn’t have an ice maker, so that’s why you see that there. 

So after much debate, we came to the conclusion that we shared in our last update: we’re gonna turn the breakfast nook into a walk-in pantry, and the fridge will go in there.

It’s hard to tell in photos, but you can kinda see in this one from a few weeks ago (before we had the light fixture correctly centered) that it would be a somewhat cramped breakfast nook. Even with just a placeholder table and chairs, it wasn’t very comfortable to move around in. Plus, with seating for 4 people at the island and 6-8 people at the dining table, it was starting to feel like overkill (keep in mind that this house will most likely sleep 8 people, and we’ll have already seating for 12 people without a breakfast nook).

The decision to turn that nook into a pantry immediately felt like a HUGE functional improvement to the first floor. We’ll have plenty more space for the dry goods that people bring to the beach (cereal boxes, bags of chips, those comically large barrels of pretzels, etc) plus we gain a spot for people to store their coolers. We’re also debating moving the microwave in there instead of having it in the island, which earns us one more deep drawer in the kitchen for more storage (we only have 8 kitchen cabinets, so we want to make the most of them). Plus we can fit a larger fridge in there too. All good things!

But I still was pretty insistent on using that sliver of wall space for refrigerating frequently used items. This means things like milk, OJ, eggs, etc can be within reach of the prep areas while the full-sized fridge will be just a few steps away in the pantry. That idea led us to this vintage-inspired mini-fridge from Amazon that jives well with our stove AND won’t visually interfere with any sight lines. Plus, it was MUCH cheaper than a lot of the other retro style fridges out there.

It arrived last week so we got to plug it in and everything (I had an ice cold Coke and it was glorious – sayonara Aquatober!). Don’t mind the big black hole in the wall below. We had to move the old fridge outlet lower to be hidden by the smaller fridge, so we still need to patch that. And of course baseboards are missing on both sides, so it’ll look a lot more finished eventually (still need to add a backsplash and our open shelves too).

But now let’s talk about the rest of the appliances. We still needed a washer & dryer for the mudroom, a dishwasher for the island, and that larger fridge for the pantry.  So we hit up Home Depot last week to hunt down some early Black Friday deals (oddly enough a ton of them are running already). We quickly zeroed in on this Maytag Bravos XL top-loading washer and electric dryer set.

Picking these was easy for a few reasons:

We have plenty of room for a standard side-by-side washer and dryer set in the beach house mudroom, so we didn’t have to hunt down some weird size or finish.

We have basically the same models in our own laundry room (ours are older and slightly smaller) and we’ve been VERY happy with them.

They were super marked down! Both originally $899, but on “Special Buy” for $599 each.

We actually got HIGHER CAPACITY laundry appliances than what we have here at home for LESS MONEY (those were $799 marked down to $651). We figure the extra room (about 1 cubic foot each) will be helpful at a beach house since they’ll mainly be used for towels and bedding.

The dishwasher was a little more challenging to select because we wanted white (so it would blend in with the cabinets, leaving the pink stove as the only accent). But oddly enough, these days stainless steel is easier to come by and in some cases – including ours – the white was actually a bit more expensive than the stainless steel version, which still shocks me.

We landed on this Frigidaire Gallery dishwasher since we had a similar Frigidaire Gallery one in our last house. We liked the inconspicuous top-controls and the blends-right-in white toekick on this model (often those are black). It was $499 at Home Depot, but I realized in writing this post that it was $50 cheaper at both Lowe’s and Best Buy, so on our way out to the beach house this weekend, I ran into Home Depot and they price adjusted it to match, so we got it for $449!

Finding a fridge was the toughest part. The breakfast nook-turned-pantry is still a challenging room for a fridge because of the windows & doorway. Basically, we don’t have any wall that can accommodate a fridge any deeper than 28″ (most counter-depth fridges start around 30″). But after some hunting, we stumbled upon this “apartment-sized” refrigerator by Haier. We’d never heard of the brand, but it’s made by GE and has really good reviews. One person even said something like “we got this for our beach house and love it!” Pretty sure that’s a sign. Since it’s not going in the main kitchen area, we don’t mind that it’s not white. Plus, it’s marked down OVER $500, so a $1,200 fridge could be ours for $698!

The last bit of savings came from a special deal that Home Depot was running based on how many appliances you buy at a time. Basically, if you buy 2 appliances you save $50; if you buy 3 appliances you save $100; if you buy 4 appliances you save $200 (that’s us!), etc. And FYI, Lowe’s is running a nearly identical promotion this month. The only difference I can see is you get the money back in gift cards, not cash.

So for anyone who lost track along the way (which includes me), here’s a quick snapshot of what we got (fridge / washer / dryer / dishwasher) and what we saved:

$2,150 is still a big old chunk of change to drop (and that doesn’t include the pink stove, mini fridge, or microwave) but we feel really good about our final selections being brands we’ve already purchased and loved, or machines that have great ratings and should totally do the job for us (we’re looking at you, fridge!).

Oh, and speaking of spending money on things that are super functional but not always glamorous, we also hung blinds throughout the entire beach house on Saturday. They’re cordless white faux wood blinds (also from Home Depot – I was getting them cut while Sherry finalized our appliance checkout).

 vanity / stool / towel / art / light / walls: SW White Heron / mirror: HomeGoods

They’re similar to the ones we installed here at home, except that they’re cordless (safer for young renters, plus they look even cleaner without those cords hanging down) so they just raise and lower just by pulling on the bottom. I can’t tell you how nice it was to shower in the bathroom for the first time without my “modesty cardboard” shoved in the windows.

floor tile / floor accent tile / marble table / tub color: SW Riverway / walls: SW White Heron

Quick tip for installing a boatload of blinds (we had 29 windows): tag team with one person unpacking and prepping them (snapping the rod in, removing the protective cardboard, etc) and the other person drilling and hanging. I also pre-drilled holes everywhere first so I wasn’t losing time switching my drill bits back-and-forth each time. It still took us about 3 hours, but it could’ve been much worse.

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We’ll give you guys an update after the appliances arrive next week, since we also owe you more about our other big plan-change in the kitchen.

P.S. To read more about how we restored this beach house over the last year, here are all the previous posts about everything from sharing the before shots and floor planning to getting drywall and mad-dash tiling three bathrooms. It’s been quite the ride, guys. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances appeared first on Young House Love.

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances published first on http://ift.tt/2qxZz2j

[interiorstarweb]

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances

I’d like to say we strategically planned to buy all of our beach house appliances (besides the pink stove, that is) during Black Friday sale season. But really, it was just some lucky timing. Timing so lucky that it saved us over $1350, in fact! The appliances won’t arrive until after Thanksgiving, but in case you wanted to snag some of the same deals, we’re sharing what we chose, how we saved, and why a last-minute floor plan change helped us get even more for less.

sconces / counters / cabinets / pendants / hood / stove / walls: SW White Heron / trim: SW Stone Isle

Let’s first talk about our change of plans. If you remember this post about planning our kitchen, we had been thinking about purchasing this fridge to go along the same wall as the stove. There were very few white fridges that fit the small area we had, so it was almost a given – but our gut told us to wait on purchasing it until the kitchen started to come together more.

It’s a good thing we did because as we started building cabinets, Sherry’s biggest fear about that fridge started to materialize, thanks to this cardboard mockup that we made out of our island stool boxes (I’m pretty sure if Serena & Lily made a refrigerator though, Sherry would want it – It’d probably be all inlay or capiz).

Anyways, the issue is hard to see in the photo above. Sure, it cramps the door molding a bit more than we’d like, but our main gripe was that it was such an obnoxious visual obstruction from this other view below – which would be seen every single time anyone walks into the room from the living room or the foyer. I’m sure part of the problem is that we’ve just grown accustomed to how open everything has been for months, but we (especially Sherry, who jokes that her tombstone could someday read “Lover Of Balance And Sight Lines”) weren’t loving how the future fridge would encroach on the view of the back door and the door to breakfast nook.

We considered moving the fridge to the back wall between the two doorways, but it was even more cramped looking back here. Sidenote: the plumber included a water line in his standard package, even though the fridge we were planning to buy didn’t have an ice maker, so that’s why you see that there. 

So after much debate, we came to the conclusion that we shared in our last update: we’re gonna turn the breakfast nook into a walk-in pantry, and the fridge will go in there.

It’s hard to tell in photos, but you can kinda see in this one from a few weeks ago (before we had the light fixture correctly centered) that it would be a somewhat cramped breakfast nook. Even with just a placeholder table and chairs, it wasn’t very comfortable to move around in. Plus, with seating for 4 people at the island and 6-8 people at the dining table, it was starting to feel like overkill (keep in mind that this house will most likely sleep 8 people, and we’ll have already seating for 12 people without a breakfast nook).

The decision to turn that nook into a pantry immediately felt like a HUGE functional improvement to the first floor. We’ll have plenty more space for the dry goods that people bring to the beach (cereal boxes, bags of chips, those comically large barrels of pretzels, etc) plus we gain a spot for people to store their coolers. We’re also debating moving the microwave in there instead of having it in the island, which earns us one more deep drawer in the kitchen for more storage (we only have 8 kitchen cabinets, so we want to make the most of them). Plus we can fit a larger fridge in there too. All good things!

But I still was pretty insistent on using that sliver of wall space for refrigerating frequently used items. This means things like milk, OJ, eggs, etc can be within reach of the prep areas while the full-sized fridge will be just a few steps away in the pantry. That idea led us to this vintage-inspired mini-fridge from Amazon that jives well with our stove AND won’t visually interfere with any sight lines. Plus, it was MUCH cheaper than a lot of the other retro style fridges out there.

It arrived last week so we got to plug it in and everything (I had an ice cold Coke and it was glorious – sayonara Aquatober!). Don’t mind the big black hole in the wall below. We had to move the old fridge outlet lower to be hidden by the smaller fridge, so we still need to patch that. And of course baseboards are missing on both sides, so it’ll look a lot more finished eventually (still need to add a backsplash and our open shelves too).

But now let’s talk about the rest of the appliances. We still needed a washer & dryer for the mudroom, a dishwasher for the island, and that larger fridge for the pantry.  So we hit up Home Depot last week to hunt down some early Black Friday deals (oddly enough a ton of them are running already). We quickly zeroed in on this Maytag Bravos XL top-loading washer and electric dryer set.

Picking these was easy for a few reasons:

We have plenty of room for a standard side-by-side washer and dryer set in the beach house mudroom, so we didn’t have to hunt down some weird size or finish.

We have basically the same models in our own laundry room (ours are older and slightly smaller) and we’ve been VERY happy with them.

They were super marked down! Both originally $899, but on “Special Buy” for $599 each.

We actually got HIGHER CAPACITY laundry appliances than what we have here at home for LESS MONEY (those were $799 marked down to $651). We figure the extra room (about 1 cubic foot each) will be helpful at a beach house since they’ll mainly be used for towels and bedding.

The dishwasher was a little more challenging to select because we wanted white (so it would blend in with the cabinets, leaving the pink stove as the only accent). But oddly enough, these days stainless steel is easier to come by and in some cases – including ours – the white was actually a bit more expensive than the stainless steel version, which still shocks me.

We landed on this Frigidaire Gallery dishwasher since we had a similar Frigidaire Gallery one in our last house. We liked the inconspicuous top-controls and the blends-right-in white toekick on this model (often those are black). It was $499 at Home Depot, but I realized in writing this post that it was $50 cheaper at both Lowe’s and Best Buy, so on our way out to the beach house this weekend, I ran into Home Depot and they price adjusted it to match, so we got it for $449!

Finding a fridge was the toughest part. The breakfast nook-turned-pantry is still a challenging room for a fridge because of the windows & doorway. Basically, we don’t have any wall that can accommodate a fridge any deeper than 28″ (most counter-depth fridges start around 30″). But after some hunting, we stumbled upon this “apartment-sized” refrigerator by Haier. We’d never heard of the brand, but it’s made by GE and has really good reviews. One person even said something like “we got this for our beach house and love it!” Pretty sure that’s a sign. Since it’s not going in the main kitchen area, we don’t mind that it’s not white. Plus, it’s marked down OVER $500, so a $1,200 fridge could be ours for $698!

The last bit of savings came from a special deal that Home Depot was running based on how many appliances you buy at a time. Basically, if you buy 2 appliances you save $50; if you buy 3 appliances you save $100; if you buy 4 appliances you save $200 (that’s us!), etc. And FYI, Lowe’s is running a nearly identical promotion this month. The only difference I can see is you get the money back in gift cards, not cash.

So for anyone who lost track along the way (which includes me), here’s a quick snapshot of what we got (fridge / washer / dryer / dishwasher) and what we saved:

$2,150 is still a big old chunk of change to drop (and that doesn’t include the pink stove, mini fridge, or microwave) but we feel really good about our final selections being brands we’ve already purchased and loved, or machines that have great ratings and should totally do the job for us (we’re looking at you, fridge!).

Oh, and speaking of spending money on things that are super functional but not always glamorous, we also hung blinds throughout the entire beach house on Saturday. They’re cordless white faux wood blinds (also from Home Depot – I was getting them cut while Sherry finalized our appliance checkout).

 vanity / stool / towel / art / light / walls: SW White Heron / mirror: HomeGoods

They’re similar to the ones we installed here at home, except that they’re cordless (safer for young renters, plus they look even cleaner without those cords hanging down) so they just raise and lower just by pulling on the bottom. I can’t tell you how nice it was to shower in the bathroom for the first time without my “modesty cardboard” shoved in the windows.

floor tile / floor accent tile / marble table / tub color: SW Riverway / walls: SW White Heron

Quick tip for installing a boatload of blinds (we had 29 windows): tag team with one person unpacking and prepping them (snapping the rod in, removing the protective cardboard, etc) and the other person drilling and hanging. I also pre-drilled holes everywhere first so I wasn’t losing time switching my drill bits back-and-forth each time. It still took us about 3 hours, but it could’ve been much worse.

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We’ll give you guys an update after the appliances arrive next week, since we also owe you more about our other big plan-change in the kitchen.

P.S. To read more about how we restored this beach house over the last year, here are all the previous posts about everything from sharing the before shots and floor planning to getting drywall and mad-dash tiling three bathrooms. It’s been quite the ride, guys. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances appeared first on Young House Love.

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances published first on http://ift.tt/2uiWrIt

[lukerhill]

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances

I’d like to say we strategically planned to buy all of our beach house appliances (besides the pink stove, that is) during Black Friday sale season. But really, it was just some lucky timing. Timing so lucky that it saved us over $1350, in fact! The appliances won’t arrive until after Thanksgiving, but in case you wanted to snag some of the same deals, we’re sharing what we chose, how we saved, and why a last-minute floor plan change helped us get even more for less.

sconces / counters / cabinets / pendants / hood / stove / walls: SW White Heron / trim: SW Stone Isle

Let’s first talk about our change of plans. If you remember this post about planning our kitchen, we had been thinking about purchasing this fridge to go along the same wall as the stove. There were very few white fridges that fit the small area we had, so it was almost a given – but our gut told us to wait on purchasing it until the kitchen started to come together more.

It’s a good thing we did because as we started building cabinets, Sherry’s biggest fear about that fridge started to materialize, thanks to this cardboard mockup that we made out of our island stool boxes (I’m pretty sure if Serena & Lily made a refrigerator though, Sherry would want it – It’d probably be all inlay or capiz).

Anyways, the issue is hard to see in the photo above. Sure, it cramps the door molding a bit more than we’d like, but our main gripe was that it was such an obnoxious visual obstruction from this other view below – which would be seen every single time anyone walks into the room from the living room or the foyer. I’m sure part of the problem is that we’ve just grown accustomed to how open everything has been for months, but we (especially Sherry, who jokes that her tombstone could someday read “Lover Of Balance And Sight Lines”) weren’t loving how the future fridge would encroach on the view of the back door and the door to breakfast nook.

We considered moving the fridge to the back wall between the two doorways, but it was even more cramped looking back here. Sidenote: the plumber included a water line in his standard package, even though the fridge we were planning to buy didn’t have an ice maker, so that’s why you see that there. 

So after much debate, we came to the conclusion that we shared in our last update: we’re gonna turn the breakfast nook into a walk-in pantry, and the fridge will go in there.

It’s hard to tell in photos, but you can kinda see in this one from a few weeks ago (before we had the light fixture correctly centered) that it would be a somewhat cramped breakfast nook. Even with just a placeholder table and chairs, it wasn’t very comfortable to move around in. Plus, with seating for 4 people at the island and 6-8 people at the dining table, it was starting to feel like overkill (keep in mind that this house will most likely sleep 8 people, and we’ll have already seating for 12 people without a breakfast nook).

The decision to turn that nook into a pantry immediately felt like a HUGE functional improvement to the first floor. We’ll have plenty more space for the dry goods that people bring to the beach (cereal boxes, bags of chips, those comically large barrels of pretzels, etc) plus we gain a spot for people to store their coolers. We’re also debating moving the microwave in there instead of having it in the island, which earns us one more deep drawer in the kitchen for more storage (we only have 8 kitchen cabinets, so we want to make the most of them). Plus we can fit a larger fridge in there too. All good things!

But I still was pretty insistent on using that sliver of wall space for refrigerating frequently used items. This means things like milk, OJ, eggs, etc can be within reach of the prep areas while the full-sized fridge will be just a few steps away in the pantry. That idea led us to this vintage-inspired mini-fridge from Amazon that jives well with our stove AND won’t visually interfere with any sight lines. Plus, it was MUCH cheaper than a lot of the other retro style fridges out there.

It arrived last week so we got to plug it in and everything (I had an ice cold Coke and it was glorious – sayonara Aquatober!). Don’t mind the big black hole in the wall below. We had to move the old fridge outlet lower to be hidden by the smaller fridge, so we still need to patch that. And of course baseboards are missing on both sides, so it’ll look a lot more finished eventually (still need to add a backsplash and our open shelves too).

But now let’s talk about the rest of the appliances. We still needed a washer & dryer for the mudroom, a dishwasher for the island, and that larger fridge for the pantry.  So we hit up Home Depot last week to hunt down some early Black Friday deals (oddly enough a ton of them are running already). We quickly zeroed in on this Maytag Bravos XL top-loading washer and electric dryer set.

Picking these was easy for a few reasons:

We have plenty of room for a standard side-by-side washer and dryer set in the beach house mudroom, so we didn’t have to hunt down some weird size or finish.

We have basically the same models in our own laundry room (ours are older and slightly smaller) and we’ve been VERY happy with them.

They were super marked down! Both originally $899, but on “Special Buy” for $599 each.

We actually got HIGHER CAPACITY laundry appliances than what we have here at home for LESS MONEY (those were $799 marked down to $651). We figure the extra room (about 1 cubic foot each) will be helpful at a beach house since they’ll mainly be used for towels and bedding.

The dishwasher was a little more challenging to select because we wanted white (so it would blend in with the cabinets, leaving the pink stove as the only accent). But oddly enough, these days stainless steel is easier to come by and in some cases – including ours – the white was actually a bit more expensive than the stainless steel version, which still shocks me.

We landed on this Frigidaire Gallery dishwasher since we had a similar Frigidaire Gallery one in our last house. We liked the inconspicuous top-controls and the blends-right-in white toekick on this model (often those are black). It was $499 at Home Depot, but I realized in writing this post that it was $50 cheaper at both Lowe’s and Best Buy, so on our way out to the beach house this weekend, I ran into Home Depot and they price adjusted it to match, so we got it for $449!

Finding a fridge was the toughest part. The breakfast nook-turned-pantry is still a challenging room for a fridge because of the windows & doorway. Basically, we don’t have any wall that can accommodate a fridge any deeper than 28″ (most counter-depth fridges start around 30″). But after some hunting, we stumbled upon this “apartment-sized” refrigerator by Haier. We’d never heard of the brand, but it’s made by GE and has really good reviews. One person even said something like “we got this for our beach house and love it!” Pretty sure that’s a sign. Since it’s not going in the main kitchen area, we don’t mind that it’s not white. Plus, it’s marked down OVER $500, so a $1,200 fridge could be ours for $698!

The last bit of savings came from a special deal that Home Depot was running based on how many appliances you buy at a time. Basically, if you buy 2 appliances you save $50; if you buy 3 appliances you save $100; if you buy 4 appliances you save $200 (that’s us!), etc. And FYI, Lowe’s is running a nearly identical promotion this month. The only difference I can see is you get the money back in gift cards, not cash.

So for anyone who lost track along the way (which includes me), here’s a quick snapshot of what we got (fridge / washer / dryer / dishwasher) and what we saved:

$2,150 is still a big old chunk of change to drop (and that doesn’t include the pink stove, mini fridge, or microwave) but we feel really good about our final selections being brands we’ve already purchased and loved, or machines that have great ratings and should totally do the job for us (we’re looking at you, fridge!).

Oh, and speaking of spending money on things that are super functional but not always glamorous, we also hung blinds throughout the entire beach house on Saturday. They’re cordless white faux wood blinds (also from Home Depot – I was getting them cut while Sherry finalized our appliance checkout).

 vanity / stool / towel / art / light / walls: SW White Heron / mirror: HomeGoods

They’re similar to the ones we installed here at home, except that they’re cordless (safer for young renters, plus they look even cleaner without those cords hanging down) so they just raise and lower just by pulling on the bottom. I can’t tell you how nice it was to shower in the bathroom for the first time without my “modesty cardboard” shoved in the windows.

floor tile / floor accent tile / marble table / tub color: SW Riverway / walls: SW White Heron

Quick tip for installing a boatload of blinds (we had 29 windows): tag team with one person unpacking and prepping them (snapping the rod in, removing the protective cardboard, etc) and the other person drilling and hanging. I also pre-drilled holes everywhere first so I wasn’t losing time switching my drill bits back-and-forth each time. It still took us about 3 hours, but it could’ve been much worse.

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We’ll give you guys an update after the appliances arrive next week, since we also owe you more about our other big plan-change in the kitchen.

P.S. To read more about how we restored this beach house over the last year, here are all the previous posts about everything from sharing the before shots and floor planning to getting drywall and mad-dash tiling three bathrooms. It’s been quite the ride, guys. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances appeared first on Young House Love.

[sos-amchespin-sendhelp]

SOS CQ DE 40.4166N; 3.7038W? = CS @█████████████

K̅A̅

CANT TX FOR LONG; BUSY FIGHTING FOR LIFE OVER INTRADUNGEON APPLE ORCHARD; LONG STORY;

BUT ARE YOU ALL INSANE QUESTION MARK

DO NOT EXPLORE ULTIMATE WILDS

DUNGEONS INDUCING TEMPORAL SLASH BIOLOGICAL REVERSION ARE ABSOLUTE NO GO; II ABSOLUTE NO GO. ZERO ISLE FULL OF EM AN GUESS WHAT; I N GO

LOSEING EXP; MEMORY; PHYS. DEV; TO PARAPHRASE PRIOR TX. NO NR. OF GUMMIS HELPFUL. REVERSABLE; SURE; MAYBE NR 1-2 VISITS ARE FINE BUT

IRREVERSABLE ENTROPONETIC TOLL; DUNGEON ;WARPS; YOU LIKE SMEARING GLOBS OF ACID PAINT ON CANVAS; EFFECTS CAN SLASH MAY MANIFEST THU RPT EXPOSURE

ASK YOUR HUMAN FRIEND WHAT RADIATION POISONING DOES TO PEOPLE

SHIT; PLS A̅S̅ I SORTA NEED TO NOT DIE BRB WITH REST OF MSG SRY

[additionallysad]

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances http://ift.tt/2mNDmzL

I’d like to say we strategically planned to buy all of our beach house appliances (besides the pink stove, that is) during Black Friday sale season. But really, it was just some lucky timing. Timing so lucky that it saved us over $1350, in fact! The appliances won’t arrive until after Thanksgiving, but in case you wanted to snag some of the same deals, we’re sharing what we chose, how we saved, and why a last-minute floor plan change helped us get even more for less.

sconces / counters / cabinets / pendants / hood / stove / walls: SW White Heron / trim: SW Stone Isle

Let’s first talk about our change of plans. If you remember this post about planning our kitchen, we had been thinking about purchasing this fridge to go along the same wall as the stove. There were very few white fridges that fit the small area we had, so it was almost a given – but our gut told us to wait on purchasing it until the kitchen started to come together more.

It’s a good thing we did because as we started building cabinets, Sherry’s biggest fear about that fridge started to materialize, thanks to this cardboard mockup that we made out of our island stool boxes (I’m pretty sure if Serena & Lily made a refrigerator though, Sherry would want it – It’d probably be all inlay or capiz).

Anyways, the issue is hard to see in the photo above. Sure, it cramps the door molding a bit more than we’d like, but our main gripe was that it was such an obnoxious visual obstruction from this other view below – which would be seen every single time anyone walks into the room from the living room or the foyer. I’m sure part of the problem is that we’ve just grown accustomed to how open everything has been for months, but we (especially Sherry, who jokes that her tombstone could someday read “Lover Of Balance And Sight Lines”) weren’t loving how the future fridge would encroach on the view of the back door and the door to breakfast nook.

We considered moving the fridge to the back wall between the two doorways, but it was even more cramped looking back here. Sidenote: the plumber included a water line in his standard package, even though the fridge we were planning to buy didn’t have an ice maker, so that’s why you see that there. 

So after much debate, we came to the conclusion that we shared in our last update: we’re gonna turn the breakfast nook into a walk-in pantry, and the fridge will go in there.

It’s hard to tell in photos, but you can kinda see in this one from a few weeks ago (before we had the light fixture correctly centered) that it would be a somewhat cramped breakfast nook. Even with just a placeholder table and chairs, it wasn’t very comfortable to move around in. Plus, with seating for 4 people at the island and 6-8 people at the dining table, it was starting to feel like overkill (keep in mind that this house will most likely sleep 8 people, and we’ll have already seating for 12 people without a breakfast nook).

The decision to turn that nook into a pantry immediately felt like a HUGE functional improvement to the first floor. We’ll have plenty more space for the dry goods that people bring to the beach (cereal boxes, bags of chips, those comically large barrels of pretzels, etc) plus we gain a spot for people to store their coolers. We’re also debating moving the microwave in there instead of having it in the island, which earns us one more deep drawer in the kitchen for more storage (we only have 8 kitchen cabinets, so we want to make the most of them). Plus we can fit a larger fridge in there too. All good things!

But I still was pretty insistent on using that sliver of wall space for refrigerating frequently used items. This means things like milk, OJ, eggs, etc can be within reach of the prep areas while the full-sized fridge will be just a few steps away in the pantry. That idea led us to this vintage-inspired mini-fridge from Amazon that jives well with our stove AND won’t visually interfere with any sight lines. Plus, it was MUCH cheaper than a lot of the other retro style fridges out there.

It arrived last week so we got to plug it in and everything (I had an ice cold Coke and it was glorious – sayonara Aquatober!). Don’t mind the big black hole in the wall below. We had to move the old fridge outlet lower to be hidden by the smaller fridge, so we still need to patch that. And of course baseboards are missing on both sides, so it’ll look a lot more finished eventually (still need to add a backsplash and our open shelves too).

But now let’s talk about the rest of the appliances. We still needed a washer & dryer for the mudroom, a dishwasher for the island, and that larger fridge for the pantry.  So we hit up Home Depot last week to hunt down some early Black Friday deals (oddly enough a ton of them are running already). We quickly zeroed in on this Maytag Bravos XL top-loading washer and electric dryer set.

Picking these was easy for a few reasons:

We have plenty of room for a standard side-by-side washer and dryer set in the beach house mudroom, so we didn’t have to hunt down some weird size or finish.

We have basically the same models in our own laundry room (ours are older and slightly smaller) and we’ve been VERY happy with them.

They were super marked down! Both originally $899, but on “Special Buy” for $599 each.

We actually got HIGHER CAPACITY laundry appliances than what we have here at home for LESS MONEY (those were $799 marked down to $651). We figure the extra room (about 1 cubic foot each) will be helpful at a beach house since they’ll mainly be used for towels and bedding.

The dishwasher was a little more challenging to select because we wanted white (so it would blend in with the cabinets, leaving the pink stove as the only accent). But oddly enough, these days stainless steel is easier to come by and in some cases – including ours – the white was actually a bit more expensive than the stainless steel version, which still shocks me.

We landed on this Frigidaire Gallery dishwasher since we had a similar Frigidaire Gallery one in our last house. We liked the inconspicuous top-controls and the blends-right-in white toekick on this model (often those are black). It was $499 at Home Depot, but I realized in writing this post that it was $50 cheaper at both Lowe’s and Best Buy, so on our way out to the beach house this weekend, I ran into Home Depot and they price adjusted it to match, so we got it for $449!

Finding a fridge was the toughest part. The breakfast nook-turned-pantry is still a challenging room for a fridge because of the windows & doorway. Basically, we don’t have any wall that can accommodate a fridge any deeper than 28″ (most counter-depth fridges start around 30″). But after some hunting, we stumbled upon this “apartment-sized” refrigerator by Haier. We’d never heard of the brand, but it’s made by GE and has really good reviews. One person even said something like “we got this for our beach house and love it!” Pretty sure that’s a sign. Since it’s not going in the main kitchen area, we don’t mind that it’s not white. Plus, it’s marked down OVER $500, so a $1,200 fridge could be ours for $698!

The last bit of savings came from a special deal that Home Depot was running based on how many appliances you buy at a time. Basically, if you buy 2 appliances you save $50; if you buy 3 appliances you save $100; if you buy 4 appliances you save $200 (that’s us!), etc. And FYI, Lowe’s is running a nearly identical promotion this month. The only difference I can see is you get the money back in gift cards, not cash.

So for anyone who lost track along the way (which includes me), here’s a quick snapshot of what we got (fridge / washer / dryer / dishwasher) and what we saved:

$2,150 is still a big old chunk of change to drop (and that doesn’t include the pink stove, mini fridge, or microwave) but we feel really good about our final selections being brands we’ve already purchased and loved, or machines that have great ratings and should totally do the job for us (we’re looking at you, fridge!).

Oh, and speaking of spending money on things that are super functional but not always glamorous, we also hung blinds throughout the entire beach house on Saturday. They’re cordless white faux wood blinds (also from Home Depot – I was getting them cut while Sherry finalized our appliance checkout).

 vanity / stool / towel / art / light / walls: SW White Heron / mirror: HomeGoods

They’re similar to the ones we installed here at home, except that they’re cordless (safer for young renters, plus they look even cleaner without those cords hanging down) so they just raise and lower just by pulling on the bottom. I can’t tell you how nice it was to shower in the bathroom for the first time without my “modesty cardboard” shoved in the windows.

floor tile / floor accent tile / marble table / tub color: SW Riverway / walls: SW White Heron

Quick tip for installing a boatload of blinds (we had 29 windows): tag team with one person unpacking and prepping them (snapping the rod in, removing the protective cardboard, etc) and the other person drilling and hanging. I also pre-drilled holes everywhere first so I wasn’t losing time switching my drill bits back-and-forth each time. It still took us about 3 hours, but it could’ve been much worse.

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We’ll give you guys an update after the appliances arrive next week, since we also owe you more about our other big plan-change in the kitchen.

P.S. To read more about how we restored this beach house over the last year, here are all the previous posts about everything from sharing the before shots and floor planning to getting drywall and mad-dash tiling three bathrooms. It’s been quite the ride, guys. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances appeared first on Young House Love.

[vincentbnaughton]

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances

I’d like to say we strategically planned to buy all of our beach house appliances (besides the pink stove, that is) during Black Friday sale season. But really, it was just some lucky timing. Timing so lucky that it saved us over $1350, in fact! The appliances won’t arrive until after Thanksgiving, but in case you wanted to snag some of the same deals, we’re sharing what we chose, how we saved, and why a last-minute floor plan change helped us get even more for less.

sconces / counters / cabinets / pendants / hood / stove / walls: SW White Heron / trim: SW Stone Isle

Let’s first talk about our change of plans. If you remember this post about planning our kitchen, we had been thinking about purchasing this fridge to go along the same wall as the stove. There were very few white fridges that fit the small area we had, so it was almost a given – but our gut told us to wait on purchasing it until the kitchen started to come together more.

It’s a good thing we did because as we started building cabinets, Sherry’s biggest fear about that fridge started to materialize, thanks to this cardboard mockup that we made out of our island stool boxes (I’m pretty sure if Serena & Lily made a refrigerator though, Sherry would want it – It’d probably be all inlay or capiz).

Anyways, the issue is hard to see in the photo above. Sure, it cramps the door molding a bit more than we’d like, but our main gripe was that it was such an obnoxious visual obstruction from this other view below – which would be seen every single time anyone walks into the room from the living room or the foyer. I’m sure part of the problem is that we’ve just grown accustomed to how open everything has been for months, but we (especially Sherry, who jokes that her tombstone could someday read “Lover Of Balance And Sight Lines”) weren’t loving how the future fridge would encroach on the view of the back door and the door to breakfast nook.

We considered moving the fridge to the back wall between the two doorways, but it was even more cramped looking back here. Sidenote: the plumber included a water line in his standard package, even though the fridge we were planning to buy didn’t have an ice maker, so that’s why you see that there. 

So after much debate, we came to the conclusion that we shared in our last update: we’re gonna turn the breakfast nook into a walk-in pantry, and the fridge will go in there.

It’s hard to tell in photos, but you can kinda see in this one from a few weeks ago (before we had the light fixture correctly centered) that it would be a somewhat cramped breakfast nook. Even with just a placeholder table and chairs, it wasn’t very comfortable to move around in. Plus, with seating for 4 people at the island and 6-8 people at the dining table, it was starting to feel like overkill (keep in mind that this house will most likely sleep 8 people, and we’ll have already seating for 12 people without a breakfast nook).

The decision to turn that nook into a pantry immediately felt like a HUGE functional improvement to the first floor. We’ll have plenty more space for the dry goods that people bring to the beach (cereal boxes, bags of chips, those comically large barrels of pretzels, etc) plus we gain a spot for people to store their coolers. We’re also debating moving the microwave in there instead of having it in the island, which earns us one more deep drawer in the kitchen for more storage (we only have 8 kitchen cabinets, so we want to make the most of them). Plus we can fit a larger fridge in there too. All good things!

But I still was pretty insistent on using that sliver of wall space for refrigerating frequently used items. This means things like milk, OJ, eggs, etc can be within reach of the prep areas while the full-sized fridge will be just a few steps away in the pantry. That idea led us to this vintage-inspired mini-fridge from Amazon that jives well with our stove AND won’t visually interfere with any sight lines. Plus, it was MUCH cheaper than a lot of the other retro style fridges out there.

It arrived last week so we got to plug it in and everything (I had an ice cold Coke and it was glorious – sayonara Aquatober!). Don’t mind the big black hole in the wall below. We had to move the old fridge outlet lower to be hidden by the smaller fridge, so we still need to patch that. And of course baseboards are missing on both sides, so it’ll look a lot more finished eventually (still need to add a backsplash and our open shelves too).

But now let’s talk about the rest of the appliances. We still needed a washer & dryer for the mudroom, a dishwasher for the island, and that larger fridge for the pantry.  So we hit up Home Depot last week to hunt down some early Black Friday deals (oddly enough a ton of them are running already). We quickly zeroed in on this Maytag Bravos XL top-loading washer and electric dryer set.

Picking these was easy for a few reasons:

We have plenty of room for a standard side-by-side washer and dryer set in the beach house mudroom, so we didn’t have to hunt down some weird size or finish.

We have basically the same models in our own laundry room (ours are older and slightly smaller) and we’ve been VERY happy with them.

They were super marked down! Both originally $899, but on “Special Buy” for $599 each.

We actually got HIGHER CAPACITY laundry appliances than what we have here at home for LESS MONEY (those were $799 marked down to $651). We figure the extra room (about 1 cubic foot each) will be helpful at a beach house since they’ll mainly be used for towels and bedding.

The dishwasher was a little more challenging to select because we wanted white (so it would blend in with the cabinets, leaving the pink stove as the only accent). But oddly enough, these days stainless steel is easier to come by and in some cases – including ours – the white was actually a bit more expensive than the stainless steel version, which still shocks me.

We landed on this Frigidaire Gallery dishwasher since we had a similar Frigidaire Gallery one in our last house. We liked the inconspicuous top-controls and the blends-right-in white toekick on this model (often those are black). It was $499 at Home Depot, but I realized in writing this post that it was $50 cheaper at both Lowe’s and Best Buy, so on our way out to the beach house this weekend, I ran into Home Depot and they price adjusted it to match, so we got it for $449!

Finding a fridge was the toughest part. The breakfast nook-turned-pantry is still a challenging room for a fridge because of the windows & doorway. Basically, we don’t have any wall that can accommodate a fridge any deeper than 28″ (most counter-depth fridges start around 30″). But after some hunting, we stumbled upon this “apartment-sized” refrigerator by Haier. We’d never heard of the brand, but it’s made by GE and has really good reviews. One person even said something like “we got this for our beach house and love it!” Pretty sure that’s a sign. Since it’s not going in the main kitchen area, we don’t mind that it’s not white. Plus, it’s marked down OVER $500, so a $1,200 fridge could be ours for $698!

The last bit of savings came from a special deal that Home Depot was running based on how many appliances you buy at a time. Basically, if you buy 2 appliances you save $50; if you buy 3 appliances you save $100; if you buy 4 appliances you save $200 (that’s us!), etc. And FYI, Lowe’s is running a nearly identical promotion this month. The only difference I can see is you get the money back in gift cards, not cash.

So for anyone who lost track along the way (which includes me), here’s a quick snapshot of what we got (fridge / washer / dryer / dishwasher) and what we saved:

$2,150 is still a big old chunk of change to drop (and that doesn’t include the pink stove, mini fridge, or microwave) but we feel really good about our final selections being brands we’ve already purchased and loved, or machines that have great ratings and should totally do the job for us (we’re looking at you, fridge!).

Oh, and speaking of spending money on things that are super functional but not always glamorous, we also hung blinds throughout the entire beach house on Saturday. They’re cordless white faux wood blinds (also from Home Depot – I was getting them cut while Sherry finalized our appliance checkout).

 vanity / stool / towel / art / light / walls: SW White Heron / mirror: HomeGoods

They’re similar to the ones we installed here at home, except that they’re cordless (safer for young renters, plus they look even cleaner without those cords hanging down) so they just raise and lower just by pulling on the bottom. I can’t tell you how nice it was to shower in the bathroom for the first time without my “modesty cardboard” shoved in the windows.

floor tile / floor accent tile / marble table / tub color: SW Riverway / walls: SW White Heron

Quick tip for installing a boatload of blinds (we had 29 windows): tag team with one person unpacking and prepping them (snapping the rod in, removing the protective cardboard, etc) and the other person drilling and hanging. I also pre-drilled holes everywhere first so I wasn’t losing time switching my drill bits back-and-forth each time. It still took us about 3 hours, but it could’ve been much worse.

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We’ll give you guys an update after the appliances arrive next week, since we also owe you more about our other big plan-change in the kitchen.

P.S. To read more about how we restored this beach house over the last year, here are all the previous posts about everything from sharing the before shots and floor planning to getting drywall and mad-dash tiling three bathrooms. It’s been quite the ride, guys. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances appeared first on Young House Love.

[statusreview]

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances

I’d like to say we strategically planned to buy all of our beach house appliances (besides the pink stove, that is) during Black Friday sale season. But really, it was just some lucky timing. Timing so lucky that it saved us over $1350, in fact! The appliances won’t arrive until after Thanksgiving, but in case you wanted to snag some of the same deals, we’re sharing what we chose, how we saved, and why a last-minute floor plan change helped us get even more for less.

sconces / counters / cabinets / pendants / hood / stove / walls: SW White Heron / trim: SW Stone Isle

Let’s first talk about our change of plans. If you remember this post about planning our kitchen, we had been thinking about purchasing this fridge to go along the same wall as the stove. There were very few white fridges that fit the small area we had, so it was almost a given – but our gut told us to wait on purchasing it until the kitchen started to come together more.

It’s a good thing we did because as we started building cabinets, Sherry’s biggest fear about that fridge started to materialize, thanks to this cardboard mockup that we made out of our island stool boxes (I’m pretty sure if Serena & Lily made a refrigerator though, Sherry would want it – It’d probably be all inlay or capiz).

Anyways, the issue is hard to see in the photo above. Sure, it cramps the door molding a bit more than we’d like, but our main gripe was that it was such an obnoxious visual obstruction from this other view below – which would be seen every single time anyone walks into the room from the living room or the foyer. I’m sure part of the problem is that we’ve just grown accustomed to how open everything has been for months, but we (especially Sherry, who jokes that her tombstone could someday read “Lover Of Balance And Sight Lines”) weren’t loving how the future fridge would encroach on the view of the back door and the door to breakfast nook.

We considered moving the fridge to the back wall between the two doorways, but it was even more cramped looking back here. Sidenote: the plumber included a water line in his standard package, even though the fridge we were planning to buy didn’t have an ice maker, so that’s why you see that there. 

So after much debate, we came to the conclusion that we shared in our last update: we’re gonna turn the breakfast nook into a walk-in pantry, and the fridge will go in there.

It’s hard to tell in photos, but you can kinda see in this one from a few weeks ago (before we had the light fixture correctly centered) that it would be a somewhat cramped breakfast nook. Even with just a placeholder table and chairs, it wasn’t very comfortable to move around in. Plus, with seating for 4 people at the island and 6-8 people at the dining table, it was starting to feel like overkill (keep in mind that this house will most likely sleep 8 people, and we’ll have already seating for 12 people without a breakfast nook).

The decision to turn that nook into a pantry immediately felt like a HUGE functional improvement to the first floor. We’ll have plenty more space for the dry goods that people bring to the beach (cereal boxes, bags of chips, those comically large barrels of pretzels, etc) plus we gain a spot for people to store their coolers. We’re also debating moving the microwave in there instead of having it in the island, which earns us one more deep drawer in the kitchen for more storage (we only have 8 kitchen cabinets, so we want to make the most of them). Plus we can fit a larger fridge in there too. All good things!

But I still was pretty insistent on using that sliver of wall space for refrigerating frequently used items. This means things like milk, OJ, eggs, etc can be within reach of the prep areas while the full-sized fridge will be just a few steps away in the pantry. That idea led us to this vintage-inspired mini-fridge from Amazon that jives well with our stove AND won’t visually interfere with any sight lines. Plus, it was MUCH cheaper than a lot of the other retro style fridges out there.

It arrived last week so we got to plug it in and everything (I had an ice cold Coke and it was glorious – sayonara Aquatober!). Don’t mind the big black hole in the wall below. We had to move the old fridge outlet lower to be hidden by the smaller fridge, so we still need to patch that. And of course baseboards are missing on both sides, so it’ll look a lot more finished eventually (still need to add a backsplash and our open shelves too).

But now let’s talk about the rest of the appliances. We still needed a washer & dryer for the mudroom, a dishwasher for the island, and that larger fridge for the pantry.  So we hit up Home Depot last week to hunt down some early Black Friday deals (oddly enough a ton of them are running already). We quickly zeroed in on this Maytag Bravos XL top-loading washer and electric dryer set.

Picking these was easy for a few reasons:

We have plenty of room for a standard side-by-side washer and dryer set in the beach house mudroom, so we didn’t have to hunt down some weird size or finish.

We have basically the same models in our own laundry room (ours are older and slightly smaller) and we’ve been VERY happy with them.

They were super marked down! Both originally $899, but on “Special Buy” for $599 each.

We actually got HIGHER CAPACITY laundry appliances than what we have here at home for LESS MONEY (those were $799 marked down to $651). We figure the extra room (about 1 cubic foot each) will be helpful at a beach house since they’ll mainly be used for towels and bedding.

The dishwasher was a little more challenging to select because we wanted white (so it would blend in with the cabinets, leaving the pink stove as the only accent). But oddly enough, these days stainless steel is easier to come by and in some cases – including ours – the white was actually a bit more expensive than the stainless steel version, which still shocks me.

We landed on this Frigidaire Gallery dishwasher since we had a similar Frigidaire Gallery one in our last house. We liked the inconspicuous top-controls and the blends-right-in white toekick on this model (often those are black). It was $499 at Home Depot, but I realized in writing this post that it was $50 cheaper at both Lowe’s and Best Buy, so on our way out to the beach house this weekend, I ran into Home Depot and they price adjusted it to match, so we got it for $449!

Finding a fridge was the toughest part. The breakfast nook-turned-pantry is still a challenging room for a fridge because of the windows & doorway. Basically, we don’t have any wall that can accommodate a fridge any deeper than 28″ (most counter-depth fridges start around 30″). But after some hunting, we stumbled upon this “apartment-sized” refrigerator by Haier. We’d never heard of the brand, but it’s made by GE and has really good reviews. One person even said something like “we got this for our beach house and love it!” Pretty sure that’s a sign. Since it’s not going in the main kitchen area, we don’t mind that it’s not white. Plus, it’s marked down OVER $500, so a $1,200 fridge could be ours for $698!

The last bit of savings came from a special deal that Home Depot was running based on how many appliances you buy at a time. Basically, if you buy 2 appliances you save $50; if you buy 3 appliances you save $100; if you buy 4 appliances you save $200 (that’s us!), etc. And FYI, Lowe’s is running a nearly identical promotion this month. The only difference I can see is you get the money back in gift cards, not cash.

So for anyone who lost track along the way (which includes me), here’s a quick snapshot of what we got (fridge / washer / dryer / dishwasher) and what we saved:

$2,150 is still a big old chunk of change to drop (and that doesn’t include the pink stove, mini fridge, or microwave) but we feel really good about our final selections being brands we’ve already purchased and loved, or machines that have great ratings and should totally do the job for us (we’re looking at you, fridge!).

Oh, and speaking of spending money on things that are super functional but not always glamorous, we also hung blinds throughout the entire beach house on Saturday. They’re cordless white faux wood blinds (also from Home Depot – I was getting them cut while Sherry finalized our appliance checkout).

 vanity / stool / towel / art / light / walls: SW White Heron / mirror: HomeGoods

They’re similar to the ones we installed here at home, except that they’re cordless (safer for young renters, plus they look even cleaner without those cords hanging down) so they just raise and lower just by pulling on the bottom. I can’t tell you how nice it was to shower in the bathroom for the first time without my “modesty cardboard” shoved in the windows.

floor tile / floor accent tile / marble table / tub color: SW Riverway / walls: SW White Heron

Quick tip for installing a boatload of blinds (we had 29 windows): tag team with one person unpacking and prepping them (snapping the rod in, removing the protective cardboard, etc) and the other person drilling and hanging. I also pre-drilled holes everywhere first so I wasn’t losing time switching my drill bits back-and-forth each time. It still took us about 3 hours, but it could’ve been much worse.

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We’ll give you guys an update after the appliances arrive next week, since we also owe you more about our other big plan-change in the kitchen.

P.S. To read more about how we restored this beach house over the last year, here are all the previous posts about everything from sharing the before shots and floor planning to getting drywall and mad-dash tiling three bathrooms. It’s been quite the ride, guys. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances appeared first on Young House Love.

How We Saved $1,350 On Our Beach House Appliances published first on http://ift.tt/2r6hzQy