A Pantry Makeover!

Hi readers from Kelly's Korner!Today I'm talking about the kitchen ... but it's more like my pantry.  I am currently 33 weeks along with baby girl #2 and I have had the worst case of nesting you've ever seen!  As a result, we've been slowly renovating the home, one room at a time.  The pantry was the first place in the kitchen to tackle.  To see the rest of our progress, go to the "our home" tab at the top of the blog.

Over Spring Break, Evan and I had one day where we didn't have company helping us out.  The plan was to relax and have a peaceful day at home.  We took Liliana to daycare for part of the day, worked out, and then realized "wait ... we should work on our hideous pantry!" And so, it started:

The Four Ingredient Pantry Makeover

(1) leftover trim paint

(2) wicker baskets

(3) scrapbook paper

(4) cereal containers

This project ended up being more tiresome than we expected, merely because it took us nearly a month to complete!  We thought it would be a one day affair, but by the time it was all said and done, that just wasn't happening.

Our pantry has one main, big problem: it wasn't meant to be a pantry.  It's meant to be a little home office in the kitchen.  But I must have more kitchen gadgets than the previous owner, because I need a separate pantry in my kitchen.  Call me crazy but it is an absoulte necessity.  In a beautiful world, we would get a handy man (or my Dad sometime when he's in town for an extended stay) to make this in to a pantry.  But we know budget constraints aren't allowing that to happen.

This is what we had to deal with beforehand:

As you can see, it just didn't work.  It was packed, hard to find things, dark, and just flat out embarrassing to look at.

First things first, take ALL the food off the pantry and marvel at how much worse your house looks than what it did 5 minutes before.

Then, clean off all the shelves and start painting.  We used a paint and primer in one from Behr.  The color is the top one on the swatch that includes "Oat Straw."  Already, with just a coat of paint, and some sealant (that made this pregnant lady feel light headed enough to need to step out of the house a few times), we saw improvement.  Note: this sealant takes TIME to dry.  This happened over the span of a few days and was frustrating to have the house in disarray.

One issue we ran in to was the splotchiness of the sealant.  We used a spray paint at first, and as you can see on the bottom shelf, it didn't look nice.  We ended up using some polyeurethane that provided a better protectant anyway (to prevent scratching) and we already had it in the garage anyway so even though that required taking everything down again and having it dry overnight once again, it was worth it.

As you can see, it was still missing some touches.  This is what took us so long to do.

First I went to Hobby Lobby and they had a 40% off sale on Scrapbook paper.  I wanted something simple for the background and bought 12 sheets.  After some fenagaling, we realized I had bought 5 too little which in our house means, guess it'll be another week before we have time to head to Hobby Lobby to buy those 5.  And that's exactly what happened.

I bought some baskets at Target (didn't buy enough of those either and had to head back) and then bought some cereal containers at Container Store.  Once I had finally run around town two weekends in a row just for the stupid pantry (ha! I started hating the pantry after a little while) it looks QUITE improved in our opinion!

I brought a little frame over from the other side of the kitchen just to cover up some of the ugly parts of the pantry still.  As you can see, we opted on putting the scrapbook paper up with thumbtacks.  It gives it somewhat of a rustic feel but isn't too noticeable or bothersome.  Evan put those up really patiently and I thought they looked great.

Here's a little comparison:

All in all, a good day in the kitchen.
Linking to Serenity Now.