Here is a picture of the whole shelf. You can see some of our collections..old crocks, a couple of crock bowls, some of our old jars. The black object with the wheel is some sort of old mill..not sure exactly..but it's very heavy. The red and white object is a vintage ice crusher. I have a big basket on the bottom shelf to hold all my spices since I have very little storage (old house drawback). Underneath is my old juicer and more old utensils! Oh yeah, my little wooden churn is hiding in the corner!
I have had this old shelf for over 25 years now. I found it in an outbuilding of an old house we were renting at the time. I never knew what it was made for originally but it was handmade by someone, probably the old man who had owned the house, and seemed to have been made using old scrap wood. So we dragged it out and I started scrubbing and cleaning on it. It had been painted white and most of it came out okay except for the wider top shelf. There were rust rings on it where old paint cans had been and I couldn't get them off no matter how much elbow grease I applied! I had no paint available either, nothing that I could think of except some handy, dandy contact paper. As some of you know, that contact paper was the going thing then and we covered everything with it...even walls!! Nasty stuff to remove though as I found out many years later!
I liked living in the old house but since it was very close to a state park, the state decided they wanted to buy the old place to expand the park. We had to find another place to live. I decided right then and there they weren't going to get my old shelf!! It would probably have been hauled away to the dump anyway. So I took it with me from place to place. When DH and I moved into a small apartment, my daughter stored it away for me in her basement. When we found this old house, I knew the shelf had found a home too. When we painted our kitchen cabinets I decided to give the old shelf a face lift with the same paint..after struggling to remove the 25 year old contact paper! I'll try to get some decent pictures of my whole kitchen later and show you.
