The Pantry Project: Our Food gets a House

The hubby decided to take some of his vacation time off work to embark on a long overdue project; building a pantry.

The kitchen has always been my least favorite part of this house. It’s not that it’s horrible, but while many homes these days have large, square, gourmet kitchens with islands, we have a long, narrow, non-island, “one-butt” style kitchen. It’s also one of those unfortunate kitchens that contains just enough cabinets to hold things like dishes, serving ware, glasses, etc. and then leaves you scratching your head as to where to put the actual food. So for years we’ve done the “cram and stuff” routine with the one tall, skinny cabinet we had to hold food items. Then we got creative and started using a cabinet just outside the kitchen in the living room to hold canned goods. We eventually had to move into a portion of the linen closet down the hall to hold extra drinks, paper towels, etc. When things deteriorated into sliding food under the bed we knew it was time to do something. We fortunately had enough room in the corner of the kitchen to actually build a pantry, though it required removing a window and a long since unused doggie door. Hubby did the bulk of the work himself, hiring out only the parts that were beyond his level and better left to the pros. Here are some before and after shots, hubby doing the electrical work as well as showing off by sliding through the two-by-fours (did I mention he’s down a total of forty pounds? Sadly, his wife cannot claim a similar weight loss success.) Had he tried this move few months ago it would have looked like a re-enactment of Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in the door to Rabbit’s house.

Here is the finished project.

I am overjoyed at the idea of actually walking into my pantry to see and grab food off the shelf as well as put food on the shelf without any cramming, stuffing or swearing required.

Of course, in order to keep the little guy out of this thing which looks like a built-in playhouse to him, we now must call it the "Food House."