The Impregnable Pantry
Newsletter 2026-02-11
We have a treasure vault in our house. It’s called the pantry. It contains all the things that make life worth living, and my pigs know it. I’ve kept them at bay for months with the flimsiest of defenses. If I don’t make permanent changes soon, they’re sure to break in.
To appreciate the challenges of keeping livestock (and sometimes children and husbands) out, you have to understand what our pantry is. As you probably guessed, it’s a former shower. Nothing in this house makes sense. It’s like it was custom-built for our family, even though it was erected seventy years before Lola and I were born. Our future weirdness was awaited by matching energy in architectural form. We were always coming home.
This place began around the start of World War I as a standard Victorian house with some fancy flourishes appropriate for the treasurer of a small-town bank. What’s the point of money if you can’t use it to flex on your friends by installing fancy woodwork and hiding the servants? Our back stairs are dangerously steep because, back then, there was no workers’ comp. The best thing maids and butlers could do for their own safety was learn to tuck and roll. I don’t have any way to fact check this, but allegedly the daughter of the original owner lived here almost all of her life. When she was too old to go up even the somewhat safer front stairs, she had a shower installed in the downstairs hallway outside of the half bathroom. She then turned the small office at the back of the house into her bedroom. That’s what we use as the pig room today. Clearly we’re allocating the space better than the old lady did. Imagine putting a bed for humans in a space meant for livestock.
Lola and I thought the hallway shower was a weird quirk we would tear out as soon as we moved in. I ended up showering in it for a decade. It’s hard to get motivated to get rid of working plumbing, no matter how suboptimally it’s located. After a while, it seemed strange to me that some people didn’t shower in their downstairs hallways. I didn’t stop using it until we turned our third-floor attic into a master suite. That finally made the first floor shower redundant. We had the green light to tear it out. Ever quick to make changes, we left it in place for several more years. We weren’t ready to jump into another project right away. We had just finished a major renovation. Sorry, I mean almost finished. Our attic project contractor ghosted us with five percent of the job left to go. Having been dumped once, we were content to ignore the downstairs shower practically forever. Solving a problem and pretending it’s not there are basically the same thing.
The shower had several more happy years when it functioned as a trashy closet for things that were too wet or dirty for regular storage. It sounds like a downgrade for the space, but before that, I was in there. Mops and plungers are an upgrade from me. Finally, enough time passed that we forgot how awful it is to hire people. We went back to a contractor we’d previously used who did a mediocre job on a small project. We booked him to do three things: replace the shower with a pantry, paint the downstairs bathroom, and put up wallpaper in the front room. That was two things too many. He ghosted us after removing the shower and replacing it with a pantry. It was especially awkward because he only lives a few blocks from our house. I would drive by his place often and see his truck parked outside. He would rather not work at all than work for me. I started to take the abandonment personally. I was the only common element in all of these ghostings. Then I went online and saw that everyone goes through the same thing with literally every contractor. I’m not even special at getting dumped.
At least we got a pantry out of the deal. The contractor did a bad job on it, of course. We couldn’t expect him to bring his A-game on the two days a month he actually showed up. All of the finishes were unremarkable, but the doors were especially shoddy. They were cobbled together from a leftover door from another project that the contractor had done, and by “done,” I mean “barely started and then abandoned.” For all I know, someone else is still waiting for this door, which the contractor cut in half and turned into two makeshift French doors for us. That style was the only way we’d have enough space to open the pantry while standing in the hallway. The doorknobs were also salvaged, but from our own house. We had previously removed the door from the old staircase that led to the attic. The contractor took that knob, which had a front and a back, and turned it into two handles on the front of the French doors. They were simply screwed onto the surface where they functioned as inert points to grab onto. That meant there was no latch bolt to hold the doors closed. (I had to look up what that part is called. My first instinct was to refer to it as the “sticky outie thing.”) If bumped, the doors would bounce off the shelves and swing out. That was a problem with two insatiable knee-high bettering rams in the house. The solution was a plastic child lock that wrapped around both knobs. We didn’t use it much when the kids were little, but now we needed it every day for our unusual animals. Stores could save a lot of space by combining their pet and baby aisles.
The era of the plastic lock on the pantry was a good one. There were only a few break-ins, which always happened when someone forgot to secure the lock after getting food. When we remembered to actually use it, the latch was undefeated. The metal parts of the pantry were less reliable. The doorknobs would sometimes fall off, which didn’t cause any pig emergencies but did nearly lead to a few smashed toes. The doors themselves remained as ugly as ever. It wasn’t something I noticed on my own. Lola had to point it out to me. She’s great at spotting imperfections, both minor and major. It’s why I don’t let her look at me. Even after I was aware of the unsightliness of the contractor’s work, I was able to ignore it. Lola couldn’t let it go. It became the top item on her to-do list, which is impressive given the number of other things wrong with this house. For example, we have a closet with a collapsed ceiling that we’ve completely forgotten about. Although now that it’s in a newsletter, I’ll probably have to fix that, too. I should really stop writing my way into more work.
