Making Our Home: THE PANTRY

I'm going to blog about almost all of our updates, but I wanted to start very small to show you what a difference one little closet could make.  

Between the kitchen and the living room there is a half-bath on one side and a closet on the other side.  When we bought the house the closet looked like this from the outside

And this was the inside.  We already have a coat closet, so this was just and extra closet downstairs with a shelf and a bar in it.  Oh, and a can of air!? haha!

It has a florescent light in the closet which is AWESOME especially since it's a deep pantry.

Anyway, this is right beside the kitchen, and the kitchen does not have a true pantry.  It has a ton of cabinet space, so we could have used the cabinets for pantry storage.  I just didn't want to have a useless closet and sacrifice cabinet space for food storage.  SO I decided we needed to make this closet useful.  

I planned out exactly what I wanted.  This closet is deeper than it looks.  The shelves could be 24 inches deep and 35 inches wide and this would still leave 11.5 inches of space to "step/lean" into the pantry so the shelves didn't come right to the door face.  Even though the shelves are deep, there's still a lot of "front space" so I wasn't worried about loosing stuff.  I painted the closet walls Benjamin Moore's Shaker Beige.  The baseboard we painted Benjamin Moore's Dove White.  (Note about the paint:  We used Benjamin Moore colors with Behr paint.  Benjamin Moore has the best colors (in my opinion), but Behr has continually gotten the best reviews.  So we opted for the best of both!)

I wanted to shelves to be sturdy so we bought thick plywood.  I painted a few coats of Dove White on them.  I bought some trim to put on the front of the shelves so it didn't look unfinished.  My Dad helped me wood glue the trim to the shelves and then used his nail gun to nail the trim on there.  Then I painted White Dove over the whole shelf.  

I measured so we would have 4 shelves and still enough room at the bottom for big things like bottles of water, paper towel rolls, etc.  

Then we screwed two pieces of wood per shelf into the side walls and sat the shelves on top.  The hardest part of this was making sure the shelves were level, making sure they were anchored into studs, and just working in such a small space in general.  

I am so pleased with what a transformation this little closet made in everyday living in our house.  

Here's the finished product!

And here's a picture after we got our groceries in there!

I'm SO SO pleased with how it turned out.  The best part is that we get to keep our cabinet space, we made use of this formerly useless random closet, AND WE STILL HAVE PANTRY SPACE TO SPARE!!!!

Wood Supporting the Shelves.

Trim that we painted and nailed on the front of the plywood to make the shelves look nicer!

I added this little metal wire rack in the 11.5 inch space between the door face and shelves to hold our spices.  Very convenient!

I keep a bin like this on the bottom shelf of quick snacks the kids can grab that are already portioned out.

I also bought a few more of these to put on in the back of one of my shelves to group like items together.  All my cake decorating items are in one, etc.

This was definitely on of the least exciting "rooms" I could have chosen to blog on to start us out, BUT it just goes to show what a few changes can make to even the smallest of spaces!

I plan to continue posting our "Making Our Home" blogs of all of our house projects.  I have a ton of before and after pictures ready to share!  So check back soon...I think I'll share on the foyer and steps nest.  Remember that blue wallpaper?  It's a thing of the past...thank goodness!