Pantry Makeover

We have been working on a few projects in our house (which I will post about eventually), and I randomly decided I wanted to do something with our pantry. My plan was to simply paint the walls, add a little "wall paper", repaint the shelves, and organize. Figured it was something I could have done in a couple of days.

Here is what our pantry looked like before. 

 

Just your basic, plain, and messy pantry. 

When I told Lance what I planned to do, he suggested that we replace the baseboards in there while we were at it. I really thought it was unnecessary and kind of a bit silly. But the next morning, I started pulling out the baseboards. I am pretty sure those were cemented in place. It took me 3x as long to get the baseboards out of the pantry as it did our entire living room and hallway. 

They literally came out in splinters. Little tiny piece by little tiny piece. The first little section took me well over an hour to pry/cut it out. And once I started, there was no way to back out and leave it. It all had to go.

By the last area, I had figure out a decent system and was able to get that one bigger piece there in the middle. Those boards were sure stubborn, they even broke my puddy knife. 

 Pulling off the baseboards kind of set off a chain reaction. The old shelving had little adjustable panels on the side, that big long line down the middle of the left wall.  

I had to rip those out because our new baseboards were taller and they would need to be moved up. Pulling those out turned out being harder than I thought. In the end, they were bent and pretty ruined and we decided that we would just build new shelves. We had considered it in the first place, so it wasn't that big of a deal.  

Once I got the walls all patched up and painted, we put in our baseboards. 

 Then we began building our shelves. One of the hardest parts was deciding how to space the shelving. I wanted it functional for us, but also for the next person who might live here.  

I really wanted some sort of design or pattern on the walls directly by the shelves. But I didn't want to go buy a stencil and paint it. That seemed like a lot of work. And vinyl is expensive. I had heard that you can use fabric as wallpaper. So I did some research and decided that was the best option for me. 

Of course, I learned the hard way that it would have been so much easier to do the fabric before adding any of the shelves. Oh well, it just took me a little longer. I'm really happy with how it turned out. Basically all you do is get some liquid starch, roll some on your wall, put the fabric on it, then roll the starch over the fabric. It holds really nice, but it also peels off super easily. 

Next we added some corner shelves for our spices. The we caulked, touched up paint, and started organizing! 

 We got a ton of containers from The Container Store, and I made some labels for them.

We also added some racks to the side to hold our seasoning packets.

And here is the pantry, completely finished.

  Doesn't it look awesome!

It was quite a project and ended up taking much longer than I anticipated. However, I am super pleased with how it turned out. I love having everything organized and easy to see. It'll be interesting to see how long it actually stays this orderly.