Pantry Rebuild

A while back, Tricia and I decided that we wanted to redo the pantry. We’ve had wire shelves since we moved in but we wanted to upgrade to wood shelving. After a ton of planning and talking about it we finally decided to just do it.

The plan was to remove the old shelving, patch the drywall, paint the entire panty, add the new wooden shelves, and put in under-cabinet LED lighting to tie it all together.

Step 1 – Get the electrical outlet installed for the LED lights. Our electrician, Jimmy, wired it to our motion sensor light switch so the outlet gets power only when the ceiling light comes on. This allows us to “set it and forget it!” Once the pantry door opens, all the lights come on by themselves. No switches.

Step 2 – DEMO THE PANTRY! We had a short timeframe for this because we had to move all of the food into the kitchen until everything was finished. We didn’t want to leave the food out for very long so we had to move quickly.

Here’s the before photo:

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Here’s the pantry with the food taken out:

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Next up – remove the shelves and patch the drywall. I had done this before when I put wooden shelves in our linen closet so I kind of knew what I was getting into.

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Patching drywall is HARD to do well. I wasn’t too worried because I knew the new shelves would cover the patch job…I just didn’t know how BAD I was going to be at it! Man! I figured it would be a little bit of drywall putty and then some sanding. Nope – it looked terrible! : )

Next up – PAINT! I put a fresh coat of paint over all the walls.

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Looks great, right? NOPE! Wait until you see the second coat. Those drywall “patches” really stick out!

We wanted to do something a little different with the paint. We decided to bring in the gray of our backsplash to the pantry. To kind of make it look like the backsplash goes through the panty and connects everything together.

That was the idea, at least. Once the shelves went in, you couldn’t really see the areas that are still white vs the ones that are gray. Either way, the gray background looks nice with the shelves. But first, just the paint photos.

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Step 3 – Install the shelving. We hired Ross to come and help. He did all the trim work when we built the house. Took a long morning but he got the shelving installed super quickly and they look great. Things are coming together!

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Step 4 – Paint. The. Shelves.

At this point, I had spent two days in that stupid pantry painting just the walls. I was sick of it. Now, I had to get the shelves painted and the lights installed so we could get the food out of the kitchen. Abby’s Frozen Jr. performance was coming up and I had a mandate to have this project finished BEFORE our house was full of people. I spent about three more days in that stupid room contorting myself to paint all the corners.

The shelves needed paint on the top…AND THE BOTTOM! Since you could see both surfaces, they both had to be painted. As you can see below, my “cutting in” technique left quite a bit to be desired. Lots of follow-up patching/painting needed to be done. This was all AFTER I added the silicone caulk to all the gaps.

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I painted the shelves and then we decided that they needed an extra coat of paint…so I painted them again! Went back and touched up all the little mistakes. Drank a bit of whiskey, cursed under my breath, and ended up with this:

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LOOKING GOOD! We were pretty happy with it.

Last step was the LED lights.

I had done a bit of research on what to get and how to install and went with Flexfire LEDs. These guys were AWESOME! Such a big help. I sent them drawings of what I wanted to do and made sure that I was buying the right equipment to power the lights and everything. I asked a few wiring questions and they were very helpful.

I ended up with a single driver to power the lights. There are 5 runs of lights that run in parallel. I had asked Ross to cut a hole in each shelf so I could run the wire down the right-hand side and keep everything hidden. The strips of lights would sit right under each shelf behind the front trim piece. Two coils of 16ft LED lights would be just enough for the 5 shelves.

I wired everything in place, stuck the LED lights to the shelves, connected the dimmer, and turned it on.

SUCCESS!!

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The light bounces off the white underside of the above shelf and floats down to the shelf below. It’s a very pleasing effect. With the dimmer, we could turn it up or down as we wanted. It turns out that we have left the dimmer on full power since we like the brightness so that was an unnecessary purchase, but it’s nice to have!

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Tricia put the food back in the pantry which gave us a chance to reorganize everything! We ended up with a very nice finished look.

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