Renovating 407: A Pantry was Born

You may wonder what building a pantry has to do with redoing, recycling, upcycling. And really it doesn’t other than it has to do with the renovating of the house. My mom had the bright idea that I needed a pantry (I really did) in the corner where the previous owners used to have a hutch. There really was no closet that could be turned into a pantry.

This is what the space looked like after I had moved in. As soon as the carpet was put in the bedrooms, my son and I decided it was livable and the rest of the work could be done while living there. We had torn down the wall, removed the carpet and lining and hadn’t gotten to the lights or anything yet. But my parents had gotten their new fridge, so the plumber had been here to replace my old one with this beauty and install the water line to it.

For the pantry, we had to work around 2 light switches (and left an electrical outlet inside the pantry) but the size is perfect.

My parents had the cabinet part complete with sections and shelves built within a week or so. It even has room for my vacuum.

It took us a little longer to decide on what to do about doors. We finally decided on sliding barn doors and my mom came up with this double closet door track idea.

My parents helped me with the beginning of the doors, making sure we got them the right size. We started off with a thin piece of plywood and then used the tongue and groove wood on top of the plywood. From there, I measured, cut and glued 1x4s to frame around the front of the doors and make a design. Considering my fear of power towels that can harm me, I think I was pretty vigilant in this work. I also filled in all cracks and whatnot with wood filler and sanded everything down.

After getting the doors installed, complete with those large handles I found at Lowe’s for under $10 each, my brother and I framed in the cabinet. (I started painting it and didn’t like the color or sheen, so it sat like this for upwards of 6 months and I might have wished I had stained it at times).

I finally decided I wanted to try navy blue out. I had seen the back of an island and loved the navy blue on it. And really just went with a color I liked at Home Depot. This time making sure I got semi-gloss.

I am thinking the handles need to be gold to really pop off of the blue. And eventually we will be taking that slider out and filling in the wall so the baseboard will be finished then. I even got a light installed up there but think maybe it needs to go the other direction to be parallel with the pantry.