Pantry storage plans

Pantry storage plans

Hey, Happy St. Patrick’s Day you guys! I hope you’re enjoying a little something extra in your coffee this morning. I will be celebrating by painting the pantry. Womp womp. But I’ll definitely be wearing green while I do it!

One of the projects that we’re most excited to work on is the pantry. We absolutely love how much space we have, so we definitely want to take advantage of the storage potential. We used to have some shelves and cubbies in here and liked how much we could store, but we really wanted to do something that matches our new kitchen a little better. Basically, we wanted to fancy this place up a bit. We debated a bunch of different options, like building our own shelving system, but that seemed like way too much trouble, not to mention super expensive to buy all that wood. So we decided our best option was to buy something pre-made and add trim and moulding to make it look like a built in.

We needed to find a shelving system that wasn’t very deep because our room is only about 4-1/2 feet wide. A lot of bookcases are about 15 inches deep, which just takes up a little bit too much room for us. Ideally we also wanted something that we could build pretty tall, since we have high ceilings that we might as well take advantage of. I love the idea of having TONS of storage space in here. Ikea’s Billy System fits all of our size requirements, and we like that we can add doors too. They have a bookcase that is 79-1/2 inches tall, 31-1/2 inches wide and 11 inches deep. They also offer height extensions to go with it, that are an additional 13-3/4 inches tall.

We decided two Billy bookcases, along with two height extensions and four doors would be the perfect solution for us, and it’s great, too, that all of that is under $250 — plus a four-hour round-trip drive to the closest Ikea in Pittsburgh (ugh, will Cleveland ever get an Ikea??). We got the doors to put along the bottom half because we like the idea of having some closed storage for those not-so-pretty things that we don’t use very often, like the fondue pot (does anyone ever use their fondue pot? I always want to because, um, does it get better than chocolate and cheese? I’m going to make it a goal to use it soon!). We also want some open shelves on the top half for food, cookbooks, and whatever other things we want to keep more handy. The nice part is, if we decide we need more storage, we can always add more height extenders.

I drew up this little diagram of what we want to do (don’t judge my drawing skills!!):

This shows the two bookcases next to each other, with the doors along the bottom and height extenders on top. Our plan is to add some crown moulding to the top and wrap the baseboards around the sides. We’ll also put some trim between each individual bookcase to hide the gaps and make it look like one big unit. Painting the back of the bookcases would be a really fun way to add a pop of color to this otherwise super neutral room, but we don’t really know what color we want to do. Knowing us, it will either be yellow or teal! We’re nothing if not consistent. We’re leaning towards a dark teal-y blue for now. (I should’ve made them green just for St. Patrick’s Day!!) The rest of the room will be painted the same light grey as the kitchen.

We are going to be SO HAPPY when we can finally unpack all of the boxes that we had to put away when we emptied out our kitchen and pantry way back in October. I don’t even remember half the things we used to have, so opening up those boxes will feel like Christmas!

We’ll be working on this project all week most likely, so we’ll definitely keep you updated on our progress!

— Kerry