Pantry Remodel

When we moved into our house there was a very long list of things we wanted to fix.  We bought our house based on location, layout and how much we loved living next to the woods.  Although the layout was perfect for us we were not happy with most of the paint, flooring or much else.  Over the last year and a half we have been slowly taking care of smaller projects. Some of them have been due to urgency and others because we had the time and they didn’t cost too much.  The pantry was one of the first things we saw that needed major work but we hadn’t gotten around to it because it wasn’t urgent and there were other projects that took priority. About a week ago our super strong one year old decided to sneak off and pull the lower shelf down.  He broke it off and luckily nothing fell down and he was not hurt in any way shape or form but it motivated us to replace the door knob to the pantry so we could shut it all the way and also fix the shelving.

Our old walls were very gross and the shelves were attached poorly.  The previous owners seemed to have used several different security systems over the years and also had a defunct security box placed inside which took up a huge chunk of space.

Sketchy shelf placement. They were resting on these boards that don’t even go all the way across the walls.

They seemed to have just bent nails over the back of the shelf rather than install them correctly. The shelves were wobbly for sure and I had to be careful of how much weight I put on them.

There were also these ugly impractical shelves installed above and below the wire shelves, neither of which was in a good position to get anything off of.  I wiped the pantry down when we moved in but we never got around to repainting the walls so they were still and eyesore from many years of use.

My husband yanked everything out, washed the walls with TSP, sanded everything down and then repainted them a basic off-white.  It didn’t take too long. We spent some time waiting for everything to dry in between and shuffling around all of our pantry items on our kitchen counters for the weekend. If you use TSP make sure you are in a well ventilated area and wear hand and eye protection. It is a pretty strong chemical but it works well when you have dirty gross paint. We dilute it more than recommended because I don’t like using too many chemicals and avoid using it if at all possible but these walls really needed it.

Our pantry wasn’t a standard width so we ended up having to go to Home Depot to get some boards cut down to size. We installed them with adjustable shelving since we were adding a shelf and didn’t know how our food would fit. At some point we will need to replace the ugly flooring and somehow remove the crumbling cork board they glued to that back of the door with industrial strength glue but not this week. We will probably wait and redo the floors when we redo our kitchen/install hardwoods in a few years.  I have no idea how to get the cork board off though. I still need to do some research on that but I may end up waiting until we get around to replacing all of our doors with solid core ones.  The ones we have are super cheaply made and original to the house so they have taken a beating.

Overall the pantry looks much better! If you ignore the floor and the cork board it looks wonderful. I am really thankful my husband was able to complete it so quickly. He did an awesome job!

We bought some white bins from Ikea for all of our little items.  We have a bunch of different kinds of flours and starches that are messy on the shelf and used to drive me crazy. The bins really help keep things organized.  We bought a few when we moved in and we bought three more last week and they are working great so far.  Now that the shelves make more sense we have a bunch more room. I will probably pull some unused dishes from our kitchen cupboard and some frequently eaten foods from our garage shelves since we are constantly in and out of there. The garage doesn’t hold and even temperature so sometimes we have to bring food in anyways to prevent it from spoiling.

I am really excited about our new pantry! It was a great weekend project and now we can check one more thing off of our list!

What projects are you working on?