This past Friday Ian and I finally finished putting the walk-in pantry together! It had been a couple weeks between painting it and putting the shelves in because we have been so busy with family and work. We have two coat closets and a mudroom bench with hooks. One closet is by the front door, and the mudroom bench and other coat closet are by the garage door entrance. We really don't need that many places for coats! Food on the other hand, though....so we started planning. This is what the closet looked like before:
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| View as you walk in from the garage |
It's a huge closet! Perfect for a walk-in pantry! We started pricing things out at the Container Store, but the system we wanted was going to cost about $1500. Umm....no.... So we went back to the drawing board and came up with a plan using Menards supplies and some good ole elbow grease! It took me awhile to figure out which color I was going to use, but I decided on Sherwin Williams Watery Blue (love it!). Here we are prepping for paint:
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| Boji is making sure Ian is doing it right |
Then I started the "cutting in" of the paint job by painting around the trim and along the ceiling. This took way longer than I thought, and things were busy for the next few days after that so we didn't get the actual walls painted for a couple weeks. Once that was done, Ian started cutting down the metal brackets and braces of the bracket hanging system we picked out at Menards. The whole system, including the wood shelves, cost us less than $200. Score! Plus Ian got to use his new Dual Blade saw (very loud on metal....yikes)!
We started hanging the braces first. This took some time. We had to find studs for a couple of the holes, drill for anchors in a couple other holes, and level it all out. It was definitely a two person job.
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| Hanging the side wall braces (Ian didn't like that I was making him pose for pictures) |
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| Hanging the back wall braces |
The boards we bought were on sale in a faux wood finish. They were 16" by 96" so we cut them down to 16 x 50" and 16 by 48". This way we could make a faux "flush" corner with them and still have lots of storage space (and less boards to purchase)! We also found a hanging spice shelf organizer at Costco for $35 with different size baskets included. We thought that would be good for the little things that tend to get lost on the shelves! The corners didn't line up exactly because of cutting and measuring on different walls, but it's very minimal so it's hard to tell. The brackets are screwed into each shelf, too, so these puppies can hold mega weight!
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| Finished shelves |
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| View of the hanging basket system |
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| Finished view from the garage entry! Hard to tell the paint color, but it's brighter than in the pictures. |
We love our pantry! It adds SOOO much space in my cabinets, and is SOO much easier to see all the food we have! Plus it's great for storing all the gizmos and gadgets that we got from the wedding (and are large and bulky for cupboards)! I will have to take a "full" picture soon and post it as an update. We still would like to install some baskets that slide out under the shelves, but we haven't found a system we like yet. So stayed tuned as we tweek our project!
