ladies let your pantry fantasies run riot here

[HerHonesty]

i have a pantry, and more importantly i have a pantry which my husband is not the blind bit intersted in (lets face it his fantasies probably involve panties...)which means I can have exactly what i want without any compromise wooo hoooo!

any ideas, photos, must haves gratefully received. i think there was a thread before on similar subject but cant find it...

Oh and lots of families send their sheets out to the laundry here - largely because the logistics of drying sheets in apartments that were never designed for doing laundry are complicated.

actually that was common here till quite recently too - when my mother was newly married, working and living in a flat she sent out all towels, bedding and my father's shirts

then I was born, they moved to a house with a garden and it all went downhill from there

And lots of children are collected from school by their nounou at lunch time and go home for lunch with the nounou before returning to school for the afternoon, rather than eating in the canteen.

I must stop cataloguing retrograde French domestic routine before getting too annoyed .

I don't like sheets that have been to the laundry - they don't smell as fresh as the sheets I wash at home.

But I do send DP's shirts out for ironing - they have a machine that irons men's shirts that does a better job than any human I have ever come across .

Bonsoir - you are making me very ious.

DW has often said that she would like a housekeeper (but she has to make do with me instead). We have servants quarters upstairs - maybe I should get a French Maid in that would magically appear when we ring the bell. Although she would have to be under 5 ft tall so she could get up and down the back stairs easily.

Oh you really mustn't be . Although I live in world where domestic servants are abundant, my idea of hell is having someone under my feet at home all the time. So (much to my MOL's complete and utter incomprehension) I DIY childcare and only buy in the minimum of domestic services, and professional ones at that - no all purpose slavery in our household .

What I would really, really like are some invisible fairies to tidy up toys and magic away dust...

cleaner, ironing service and boy next door does lawns. but i am still rushed of my feet all the time. i think my husband thinks we have pixies.

now then, getting backk to my pantry. pink walls but what type of flooring? any ideas.

Definitley tiles for floors or concrete painted with that kind of paint/mastic they use on food factory floors or perhaps cheap lino. Something very easily cleaned you do not mind if it gets the odd scrape.

we ran the wood from the kitchen into it when we laid the floor - was easier than doing something separate

but something that stays cold, like quarry or ceramic tiles or painted concrete would be ideal

Our house has a pantry - it has a quarry-tiled floor and is big enough to fit our embarrassingly large freezer (an upright one), the washing-machine, dishwasher and tumble-dryer. So maybe it's half a laundry ? Apparently it was once the dairy (it's an old house).

However, it also has lots of open shelves to store things like assorted breakfast cereals, flour and sugar, booze, tinned goods, catfood, cake-tins, and my ever-increasing stock of jams, jellies and chutneys (Gawd knows when we'll eat all these, since DH doesn't really have toast for breakfast and I only do so rarely - just can't bear to waste the fruit from the garden, though!).

I lurrrrve it. And I also need it, since we have so much crap essential kitchen equipment that even half of it would never fit in the kitchen itself!

I embarrasses me that I am so jealous of you people.

I think we've got this:

www.firedearthshop.com/epages/FEShop.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/FEShop/Categories/B rowseCatalogue/FloorTiles/EncausticQuarry%26_Porcelain/Moderna&PageSize=200

It's got quite a rural, flagstone feel without going the whole hog and getting pamments or flagstones that would be hard to clean.

Now wondering if I can requisition the boys large playroom, built for them at immense expense (basement conversion) and which they refuse to use - it would be a pantry to end all pantries . Maybe I should start pinning up mood boards and doing paint samples - may chase them into using it...it even has a shelved walk in cupboard so could have a pantry within the pantry ...

I think I proper pantry should have a slate floor and slate shelving, to keep the food cool.

This is what I remember from my maternal grandmother's very traditional pantry.

how does one make slate shelving these days. i was going to wrap my shelves in oilcoloth?

Go to a floor tile supplier, buy large slates about 50 cm x 100 cm, employ a builder to knock down / rebuild walls with the slate embedded in the brickwork between new vertical brick piers.

Well that is what ours look like - maybe a bit over the top. I would go with oil cloth.

I think the slate must be regional - our pantry and larder had quarry tiles and wooden shelves, and had been like that for the last 60 years. But as I said, they do also have air vents at top and bottom.