As I mentioned in the previous post, we’ve been firing through our to-do list. It took about three weeks to finish the project, mostly because things always take longer than I plan.
THE BEFORE:
The annoying part of our pantry was that the California closet style wire shelving was bending under the weight of our couponing. To compensate, we put all of our cans on the floor – and as we bought more and more they expanded outward and consumed the pantry.
Our plan was to take these out and put in some stronger, better supported Melanine shelves. While we were at it we’d paint and add some pizazz.
Fun fact: shelving like this is held in entirely with anchors. And tearing them out will destroy your wall. I was surprised at how much wall repair was necessary with this project – but in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been.
The wall is fixed!
For stylins, we decided to paint the wall a nice grayish/slate blue and then use a white stencil for a cool pattern. Why stencil? Affordability and easy make-over-ness compared to wallpaper if we wanted to change it in the future.
Painted:
The Stencil (from THIS site)
Progress:
Let’s talk Stencils. On a simple flat accent wall? AMAZING! So easy! So quick! So beautiful! On walls that have corners and edges? MISERABLE. The stencil instructions from Royal Design Studio were pretty good for corners, but it was tough and didn’t work that well in our application.
WALLS COMPLETE:
With the walls complete I started in on the shelves. I was METICULOUS with my methods and tried very hard to be as precise as possible. The problem, was that I had foolishly assumed that the corner of the pantry was 90 degrees. Ohhhhh… so foolish. The angle was actually about 100 degrees, so I’ll have to do some trim fix ups.
The bottom three shelves have a reinforcing beam right down the center. I intend to add front faces as well, but haven’t cut the pieces yet. That, however, didn’t prevent us from filling the pantry!
Ta-Da!
BOOM! Project complete!!*
*Complete enough that I can move on to the next one…
The most impressive thing about this project is its ability to mask the fact that you have a post-apocalyptic underground bunker for a small town amount of food in there.
You should see our underground bunker!
Are you closeted Mormons?!