Kitchen bookcase and The Useful Cupboard

A year or so ago I tidied the kitchen bookcase. This old shelf unit came with us from Oxfordshire. It had been built by the father of the previous owners of the house we lived in. Old but solid. None of your shelves bowing under the weight of books here! It actually stayed relatively tidy until I emptied it and moved it to another part of the kitchen so that I could paint the wall behind it. We had a sort out of cookery books. I say we because most of them, especially the glossy ones, are Toad's. He likes cooking in theory ;)

In the usual way of one thing leading to another, bookcase sorting and moving morphed into also sorting out The Useful Box that lives in one of the kitchen cupboards, which led to my emptying an old Yorkhire Tea tin of magazine recipe cutouts, chucking most of them out and putting them in a different tin so that I could use the Yorkshire Tea tin for all the glues. I've no idea how I got onto glues! Oh, wait! I know. I'd bought some wood glue for some loose chair joints. Anyway, the whole Useful Cupboard in which The Useful Box lives got a clean out. It's a when-in-doubt-shove-it-in-(or look for it in)-the-Useful-Cupboard-place. Every household has one of those places, right?

I found some stuff to put aside for the grandsons, who are coming on a visit later this month...

This is me making progress!

...and a Japanese lunch tin of Toad's:

Then I got on with cutting away some loose plaster board and my thumb with a Stanley knife. My very old and tiny pocket penknife, once resharpened, was a nuch more effective tool (well, it was less effective at slicing my thumb being easier to use in awkward spaces!)

there's a plaster under that bandage;
it was a tiny cut!

And then, wearing some leather gardening gloves, I ripped up an old pan scrub and stuffed it into some holes in the corner behind the bookcase before fixing it in with Polyfilla.

I discovered why the kitchen telephone port that we'd ignored for ten years wasn't working: it wasn't even connected. When I told Toad this he said he'd presumed as much. Hadn't presumed to fix it though (he would have if I'd asked him to but I didn't ask so... 🙄 😉). Anyway, we even have an orange telephone, one that doesn't need a power supply, that we acquired soon after coming here because of numerous power cuts. Local power lines have been put underground now so they aren't going to get blown down in every storm or pulled down by falling trees.