Pantry Project

We bought and moved into this house almost a year ago now and before we even signed the papers, we knew that we wanted to utilize the unused space in the kitchen, next to the fridge, for a pantry. In the blueprints for the house, the space was simply marked "vent", but looking at the structure of the wall, any vent within would have to be at the back of the space, leaving a decent amount of unused space, ripe for the picking.

This project started in early February when we went to the local Re-Store and purchased a used 18"x80" door and frame for $10. Before this point, we had only used a stud-finder, marked on painters tape, to figure out where we should start.
Originally, I thought we should try and preserve the dry wall so that it could be used on the inside. At some point into cutting the wall, we figured out that we weren't going to add drywall inside the pantry and that made removal of the old drywall much easier!

Removing the existing studs ended up being more troublesome than removing the drywall because there were some places that they were triple-stacked. We also noticed a place where someone must have stepped though the ceiling, which was patched from the top down, but looked pretty awful on the inside. We decided that to protect the food in the pantry from any potential heat coming from the vent pipe, we would build a ceiling vent into the pantry that would allow for air flow through the hidden back area where the pipe was. We also build a vent into the bottom of the back wall for air intake. Then we put a 2" think piece of blue Styrofoam in between the pipe and the back wall of the pantry. 

Getting the door frame installed ended up being more troublesome than we expected, especially getting it level and then allowing the door to close freely without catching. This required several re-adjustments throughout the project. We decided that we wanted a push-button switch in the door frame so that the lights would come on when the door was opened.

In order to get electricity into the pantry, we originally considered plugging an extension cord into the extra outlet behind the fridge and running the cord, through the wall, into the pantry. Later, we thought better and decided to splice a new power cable into an existing power outlet that was on the back side of the wall, near the vent pipe. This proved to be pretty straight forward and we installed an electrical box in the middle-front of the pantry with two separate power outlets, as we were planning on plugging in 3 lights. There was definitely some white-board drawing to figure out how to wire the switch into the power outlets properly, but it actually worked out really well.

We went back and forth about what the shelf supports should be, but with some counsel from my mom, we determined that the shelves weren't going to be wide enough to really worry about sagging so much, especially if we used a thicker wood for the shelf. So, we went with only having braces on the sides and using 3/4" thick oak plywood. I really like the grain of the wood after it was stained.

Then I started wiring up the lights, which we got from Ikea up in Denver. They were really bright and pretty easy to work with. However when we saw the plugs in the outlets, we decided that it didn't look very good, so then we cut off the plugs and hard-wired the lights into the electric box. In order to make room for the wire nuts, we removed one of the power outlets and had to order a special face plate that had one hole and one side covered. We wanted to put one light bar in the center, on the under side of each shelf, so that there was sure to be plenty of light.

The trim that we selected for the outside of the pantry had grapes and leaves, which we thought would be appropriate for a "food" theme. We actually bought several paints, trying to decide if we should color in the grapes and leaves, but in the end, decided that it would look better and match the color of our kitchen cabinets better if we just left it the original color and varnished it.

The paint on the front side of the door is several coats (ended up being the whole can) of metallic primer and topped with black chalkboard paint. We wanted it to be a surface that the kid(s) could play on. The surface of the door ended up not being as smooth as it should have been, probably because we didn't sand off the original paint, so the magnetic pull is unfortunately pretty weak.

Once we got the trim installed, I didn't like that you could see the white inside the door frame, so we painted the edges of the door and the first part of the door frame black as well. Gerry got some varnish trim to cover up the front edges of the shelves, which actually worked really well. We had to go to the thrift store and buy an old clothes iron, even though we next-to-never use our current iron. ;-)

I'm not sure that the floor is the "final product" because right now, it's just a rug that we got from Ikea, folded so that it kind of fits. We might end up cutting a rubber mat to size later, if we get ambitious.

This project took us about 9 weeks, but that's because we decided to take it nice and easy, mostly only working on it on the weekends, and usually that was only about one day of the weekend. It was fun and I'm pleased with the outcome. Now, on to the next project...