Sunday was set to be a pretty laid back day. TheBoy was planning on making puerco pibil (link goes a YouTube video of an extra feature on the Once Upon a Time in Mexico DVD. Really), so I didn’t have to worry about dinner (or cleaning the kitchen). But he couldn’t find spices. He sent me to my supply of cooking items in the closet in the den (reminder: we live with my in-laws, so while I have some items IN the kitchen, most of my stuff is elsewhere in the house). While I was getting my mother-in-law caught up on the tale of the missing spices (he swore I put it in the closet with the cake dish I’d been storing them in, I said he gave me the empty cake dish)…
when… CRASH!
MIL and I ran towards the kitchen to see what happened, only to find TheBoy standing amidst shattered glass and a giant pool of pickling liquid and pickles and peppers. “I swear. I didn’t touch anything. It just fell.”
So I made everyone put on real shoes with soles (I admit, I take charge in a crisis) and we started cleaning. First the debris. Then we went about mopping so that we could vacuum up the teeny pieces of glass. Then we vacuumed and vacuumed and vacuumed- because when a jar drops from 7 feet in the air, it’s amazing how far the glass will fly.
Oddest bit of debris – the tiny can of wasabi powder wedged itself under the fridge and spilled in font of it. That was not fun to clean up.
I wish I’d taken pictures. Or video. Just know that everything smelled pickled for awhile, and we were vacuuming up shards of glass all day long.
In the end, one of the new cabinets was dinged, and one of the items actually chipped one of the floor tiles in the kitchen.
So what happened? Turns out that the holes for pegs for the shelf supports weren’t even (our kitchen isn’t level). So the guy who made the cabinets attempted to make it level by… stripping the plastic fitting around the peg (the plastic gives it the shelf a flat piece to lay on) on one side, and adding little rubber discs to the other to make it level. But those discs started to slip and on a shelf that wasn’t entirely filled, it just wasn’t level. The shelf tipped forward.
My father in law is trying to figure out how to fix it – he already found more secure brackets. They aren’t pretty, but the pantry shelves won’t slip.
So what’s the biggest kitchen disaster you’ve had to clean up?
My biggest kitchen disaster wasn’t actually mine, but some tenants. After they moved out I pulled out the refrigerator to clean and found an entire bottle of BBQ sauce had fallen and broken. They neglected to clean it up and it was “glued” to the floor tile. It took me days to get it all out of the grout. Not to mention the smell was horrendous.