Sprangles

Background

The pantry that came with our house was woefully small - a narrow floor-to-ceiling cupboard only 50cm wide. It’s fairly impractical for us since Lana can’t reach the stuff on the top shelves, I can’t reach the stuff on the bottom shelves (too far to bend down) , leaving only the middle shelves to put everything we need regularly.

Before we started building - the walls are marked out on the floor with electrical tape, and the small pile of stuff on the floor is the stuff my sisters bought for us to start the pantry

Lana had the idea of building a new walk-in pantry in the space where the previous owners put their dining table. We didn’t have any funds for it, so I marked the layout of the new pantry on the floor in electrical tape and we started saving (we were trying to pay for our wedding & honeymoon at the time).

A screenshot (Google Sketchup) of the pantry plan that I knocked up after Lana had the original idea. It

My sisters & nieces came through for us as a wedding present — when we came home from our honeymoon there was a little pile of pantry items (paper towels, cans of food, etc) in the space where the pantry should be, along with an envelope full of cash to get us started. Hooray!

Construction: Phase 1

As soon as humanly possible I went down to Bunnings and bought all the preliminary things we’d need — timber, plasterboard, a door, etc — and got to building.

Phase 1

Build walls for the pantry, fit a door get an electrian in to wire up new lighting, and paint it all. That way it looks finished from the outside so when the door is shut the house doesn’t look like a building site.

Phase 2

Design and fit shelving to the inside of the pantry — a tough decision!

Construction was pretty simple, standard structural pine framing covered in Gyprock plasterboard. The only tricky part was the 45° chamfer on the corner which took some fiddly framing and plastering.

I had to remove the jarrah sliding door next to the pantry; I was hoping to re-hang it as a swing door but the door is too wide to be cut down to size. We bought a new all-glass door that I think will look great. The only risk with the new door is that people might walk into it!

Colours

We ended up debating long and hard about colours, I didn’t think it would be so hard to choose! We’re repainting the entire house so all the colours will change, but I think our choice of colours has been influenced by the existing colours and the exposed brick. The previous owners had painted the whole central area of the house a bright green colour, it was pleasurable enough just to paint over that with the white basecoat.

The final colour selection was for “Chalk USA” on the walls, and “Stallion White” on the frames and the ceiling. I think it looks pretty good, and it gives us flexibility to add colour to the room with furnishings. We hung a print that Lana’s uncle Mark had made us for our wedding on the outside of the panty, and it looks terrific:

Phase 2: Shelving

The next part of the pantry is to put shelving inside. We debated a few options, including a lego-like snap-together system called Elfa, but in the end we decided to build it ourselves because it’s cheaper and will look better. So the first step in that process is to model what we want and generate a materials list:

Look at that shelf space! The parts at the bottom are drawers, and inside the chamfered corner will be a wine rack. I used Google Sketchup to do the modelling again — it’s just fantastic that they make such a great program available for free.

I started the shelving by putting in the skeleton of the drawers at the bottom, with no actual drawers. They provide a support base for all the shelving above that. I did it this way because I was conscious of keeping the whole structure pretty solid — I would hate to load it up with supplies and then have all the shelves buckle and collapse.

Building the shelves was a whole lot harder than I expected, principally because nothing (not even the original brick walls) were square. I knew this going in, but I didn’t expect it to be such a burden. In the end I’m fairly happy with how the shelves turned out, but I’m not happy with the way I acted during the process — there was a lot of ranting and swearing at some stages, and I should be better than that.

Here’s a shot of the pantry from outside with the top shelves done:

And then looking inside, here’s some detail of the shelves. It’s clear in the bottom half that I haven’t finished — the next step is to make drawers to go in those spaces:

Once all the paint had dried, we gleefully loaded up the shelves with the stuff from our existing pantry. It’s a bit disorganised, but everything fits with space to spare:

Apart from the empty shelves on the left, there’s the whole top shelf (which is just beyond Lana’s reach) for long-term storage. And if that wasn’t enough space, I’ve still got 20 drawers to add! It’s really a pleasure to use the pantry even though it’s half-completed after using that narrow cupboard for so long.

View all the photos at flickr related to the pantry renovation.