At the beginning of the year, I had one specific project in mind that I have been wanting to complete for ages and that was remodeling our pantry. I had visions of a farmhouse style pantry, with all the pretty bins, and baskets, and labels and jars, oh my!
Before
We had builder standard white wire shelving which I honestly do not understand how they are deemed functional. I don’t get shelves with gaps. Initially, I researched ways to utilize the existing shelves by adding MDF boards or doing faux wood but it all seemed too complicated. I finally convinced Matt that the easiest solution is to completely replace the existing shelves.
Sketch and Measure
I drew out a simple sketch of our pantry and measured, re-measured and measured some more. Despite all the measuring, we still made a .25 inch mistake later on which was easily resolved – you can check out my ‘Pantry’ highlight on Instagram to see more on that. But I mention this because in the world of home projects, measuring is your absolute most important step!
Clean Out
Pantry clean out began. We threw away a full trash bag of old and expired items. Which by the way, even if you are not doing a complete pantry makeover, I highly recommend taking every single item out of your pantry to get a clear picture of your inventory. Pantry clean out was the easy part.
The hardest part of this entire process was removing the white wire shelving and spackling 135 holes. Yes, we had that many. Insert Matt fuming from the ears here and second guessing our decision to replace the shelves. I recommend using an electric sander like this one) to sand down the spackling. After this step, we breathed a sigh of relief!
Paint
We painted the pantry with our favorite gray color. This is the formula we used throughout the house:
101-1 Y37
107-1 Y39.5
109-7.5
Supplies
I decided on Chestnut Oak laminate boards for the shelves. They come in various lengths and widths so you can customize as needed for your pantry. We did have to cut down 5 of the 10 shelves for the right side wall to fit.
10 shelves 70-inch x 12-inch; 5 for the right wall, 5 for the center wall
3 shelves 24-inch x 12-inch; 3 for the left wall
8 70-inch black tracks
33 2-inch x 12-inch black brackets
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I purposely lessened the amount of shelves on the smallest side of the pantry because I wanted space for our vacuums to fit all the way up against the wall. And despite that, I still have so much more shelving space than before!
One feature that I absolutely love is the adjustable tracks! We can move our shelves up and down to customize as needed. The amount of tracks and brackets depends on the amount of shelves as well as the studs in your wall. You can use a stud finder like this one to help find the supporting structures behind your walls which you need to locate to drill your tracks into.
Storage
Once we installed the tracks, brackets and shelves, it was time for the fun part – organization! Remember the step I talked about earlier where we took everything out of the pantry? This gave me a clear visual of categories of inventory and the storage solutions I needed for each category. This did take some trial and error but eventually with buying a few new storage bins and using what I already had, it worked!
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After
You can watch videos of the full pantry makeover process and reveal under my story highlight ‘Pantry’ on Instagram.
Thank you for stopping by and checking out my pantry reveal!
