It's All About Storage - Pantry Makeover Update

The Great Pantry Makeover is done……almost.

Have you noticed that all my room makeover posts contain the words “almost” and “sorta?”

But really, is any room ever truly “done” in a house?  (I’m gonna say “no” because that makes me look less like a flake and more like a “it’s all about flow and change” kinda guy.)

So, let’s try that again:

My Pantry is flowing toward change!

…..It’s just flowing more slowly than I had anticipated – more swamp than Mighty Mississippi.

But, a lot of it’s done so I thought I’d share the progress.

You may recall it started like this:The goal was to make this tiny room-of-a-million-doors more like an extension of the kitchen and less like a cluttered, inefficient mess without spending much money.

So, gone was the harsh yellow and in its place the same color as the kitchen and all the shelving and trim got a nice, bright white paint makeover.

The space above the washer was fine.  It wasn’t in the budget to add cabinets so some paint cleaned things up nicely.

To keep clutter contained I cobbled together some boxes out of scrap wood.  I used some more leftover wood to trim them out to mimic  the shaker style of the kitchen cabinets.  The chalkboard tags are made out of leftover bits from coaster-making  (and used up the last few drops in two cans of chalkboard spray paint)

I forgot to take a picture of the pantry closet before I ripped it apart.  It had fixed,  shallow shelves that absolutely NOTHING fit on!  It was uncanny.  Cereal boxes were too tall and you could fit one can depth- wise but not two.  It drove me nuts.  It was also the only place to hang mops and brooms and such so you got the double whammy of “nothing fits” and everything falls off the wall when you reach inside.

So I ripped out the shelving and replaced with adjustable track shelving.  I splurged a bit on two basket shelving units from The Container Store (on sale) that gave me door storage and fit perfectly on the inside wall. (and have made the disturbing realization that my “pantry staples” seem to be booze and pasta……)

But that displaced all the brooms and things and there was only one area left.  The corner near the outside door where the water heater had once stood.

I’d had a bookshelf/rack thing there there for a while which looked lousy.  The corner would have to contain mops/brooms, shoes…..and all the stuff that used to be on the shelf/rack thing.

But it’s an odd sized space and nothing “off the rack” was going to work.  And I didn’t want some big storage unit there as I thought it would make the tiny room even tinier.

So I kind of cobbled together my own idea.

I found some affordable, flexible cabinets at Ikea in the kids department.  They were great but kid-sized so the base cabinet was too short.  I built a little platform out of scrap which raised the cabinet up and also allowed me to create a slide out shelf for shoes.

I still needed a spot for brooms though.

The only vertical space was by the door but there wasn’t going to be room for a cabinet and I wanted them to be easy to access.

I had some left-over peg board and I thought I could make a slide out wall rack.  I built a frame, attached the pegboard and installed two drawer slides to the wall and voila!  Now I can slide out the unit when I need something and slide it back out of the way when I’m done.

Sweet!

Now when I walk in the house I’m not overwhelmed by piled up junk.

The sink is still my big “to do” item.  I cleaned it but the tile around it needs work and I want to build some kind of an enclosure for the bottom.  I’ll flow into that task very soon.