Saturday, February 2, 2008

Building A Turn-of-the-Century Pantry

The white melamine cabinets that the previous owners installed in the old pantry didn't exactly blend with their surroundings. In fact they looked down right, well, cheap. So they were relocated to the garage and recycled into a gardeners bench.

Since this house never had a pantry to begin with it's difficult to imagine what would be "age appropriate". But luckily, we just so happen to be related to a certain unnamed individual who has a farmhouse built about the same time as ours. I'm keeping her unnamed because if she finds out I posted pictures of her pantry on the internet for the ENTIRE WORLD to see, she'll never let me here the end of it. (Seriously, the woman still reminds me about stuff I did when I was three.) Anyway, the cabinets look remarkably similar to our original kitchen cabinets. If you really look at the design though you can see it could use some tweaking. Full-width doors for instance so you don't have to pull everything out to get to the ends of the shelves.



Oh, and while I was visiting her she was stripping the wallpaper in her dining room revealing the original faux linen paint finish and stencil. You can see there was picture rail at one time too. This is what I'm planning for our family room someday. Well the molding and the upper stencil. I'll probably skip the smaller one.



Oh yeah, back to the pantry... after studying the photos, looking through all of our cabinetry books and scratching our heads and tapping our chins for a while we came up with a plan. Sort of. We're still winging it as we go to some degree. Last weekend the bottom section went in. Today was the day to move in the top piece. It's 83 1/2 inches wide. And weighs about 6400 lbs. OK, maybe not that much but it's REALLY heavy.


To say getting it into the room and up on top of the other was a challenge would be a bit of an understatement. I have to admit, there was some foul language involved. But as you can see...



It all worked out in the end. Now on to the face frame and the doors.

6 comments:

Sandy said...

Love those shelves! Looks great.

Renee said...

They look great. I have the ugly pantry. But an ugly pantry is better than no pantry.

Jayne said...

Awesome! I can imagine that wrestling that thing into place was quite the chore. Is the family room the one with the creepy doll border?

Anonymous said...

Very nice job. It's great to see pantry's making a come back. We have people inquire about them all the time when we build new homes.

Christine said...

Jayne,

Nope, that's the parlor, but I'm planning a stencil and picture rail for that room too.

Anonymous said...

Very nice. I like that you used beadboard backing. I noticed that you did not continue it all the way down. How will this area be treated?