Playing with the Pantry

I have such good intentions of posting more regularly--but apparently it's going to take a while to develop the habit!

This next project is one that was in the works for a verrrrry long time.  In our house, we have a "butler's pantry"...that is, a walk-through hall from the kitchen to the dining room.  One one side, there is a short row of cupboards, and on the other side, there is a regular pantry closet.

Years ago, I put up shelves above the cupboards and filled them with these glass jars from World Market (I was patient and got them for less than $10/each, with coupons).  I *love* how they look!  I also made the "Groceries and Crockery" sign above the jars from a piece of reclaimed wood.

I do a lot of baking!  It's one of my favorite things to do.  So the butler's pantry is my unofficial "baking center," since that's where I keep the mixer and my staples like flour, sugar, and chocolate chips!  But when I say I do a LOT of baking, I'm not kidding...when all my kids are home, I make about 6 loaves of bread a week--that's at least 12 cups of flour, and my pretty glass canister only holds about that much.

To save emptying and refilling my glass jars quite so often, I would generally just bring in one of these beasties from the garage.  They hold 25 lbs of flour (or sugar, or whatever), and the wide opening was convenient to use.  But they're not that pretty to look at.  And in all honesty--often they just tended to live in the pantry for days on end, rather that moving in and out and in and out over and over again.

So you can imagine that when I came across this style of bin, I was intrigued.   Marketed for pet food, I could find no reason it wouldn't work just as well for food staples.  They are food-grade and have a sealing lid to keep out bugs.  I thought how convenient it would be to just store these IN the pantry, and I could roll them out whenever I needed a lot of flour or sugar. 

There was just one problem:  They didn't fit in my pantry.

So this is the "before" of my pantry.  It had four 22" deep Rubbermaid shelves.  The bottom shelf, unfortunately, was not tall enough to put the wheeled container under, or the orange-lidded bins I had been using.  But since I wasn't crazy about the Rubbermaid shelves anyway, I figured it was high time for a pantry makeover!

I was inspired by the pantry re-design of Lucy Designs.   She ditched her wire shelving and built wrap-around shelving instead.  I only had just over 7" of room on each side wall, but I carefully calculated out areas, and I determined that five narrower, wrap-around shelves would actually give me more surface area than my five deep Rubbermaid shelves, with the added bonus of being able to use the floor space the way I wanted to.

All that said...it took me MONTHS to get started.  I ordered three of the pet-food bins in January 2018.  I finally re-did my pantry the week before Thanksgiving 2018.  So for 11 months, the bins sat stacked in a corner of my dining room!

First step was obviously to clear everything out.  Taking out the Rubbermaid shelves is reasonably easy (usually).  You can see how they are specially designed clips all along the back edge.  A flat-head screwdriver helps to open those up, and then the shelf pretty much lifts free.  All of those clips are attached with drywall anchors, though, so a combination of a screwdriver and a pair of pliers are often needed to get those out.

Next I put up rails for my five shelves.  I marked all the studs and screwed them in where studs were.  I started on the left and worked counterclockwise around the closet.

For the rails I bought pre-primed 1x2 MDF boards.  For the shelves I bought a single sheet of 3/4" thick MDF and cut it down to the sizes I needed.

I don't have pictures of the next phase, but it involved a lot of cutting and fiddling and adjusting!  The shelves along the back wall were cut the full width of the closet.  This way they were supported on three sides, which makes sense since they will be the ones supporting the most weight.  In my closet, the bottom two shelves are 16" deep and the top three are 12" deep.

The side shelves are 7 " deep.  They are supported on their back sides (the sides of the closet) and one end with rails, and then I used a mending brace to attach them to the wide back shelves.

Those narrow side shelves also had to be notched out to fit around the door molding on the inside of the closet.  If I hadn't done that, they would have had to have been even narrower than 7", I wasn't willing to do that.

After that it was caulk...and caulk...and more caulk!  Then paint...and paint...and more paint!  I had primed my shelving boards before installing them, but in some ways it was just easier to finish up once they were installed.  I ran out of space to dry boards in my garage, and it was cold enough that they didn't dry very fast anyway!

I was thrilled with how it looked, and sent pictures to all my relatives ;-)  I let everything dry for about 48 hours before moving all my dry goods into their newly improved home...

 

I put just as much stuff on my narrower shelves, but it's SO much easier to see and find things!  I love love love that.

I did purchase about three new glass jars to hold my collection of chocolate chips...milk, mini semisweet, bittersweet, white chocolate, and peanut butter!  Mmmmm.....
 

 

And my favorite part...bins of flour, sugar, and rice slide neatly under the bottom shelf!

 

 With holiday baking, I probably went through 75-100 lbs of flour...but with only a few trips to the garage, and my baking area stayed neat!

And my best guess is that the pantry makeover came in right around $100, and that's including the few new containers I bought.

Back to Building! Vanity project

It has been a long, long time since I built anything other than shelves...and although there were a few hiccups along the way, it felt GOOD!

Here is my latest project:

And please excuse the cell-phone photos--it's all I got before it went to it's new home! 

You may be wondering why this is titled as a "vanity."  Well, that's what this piece will be when it finally grows up all the way!  But it's not for MY home, so the final drilling and installing hasn't happened  yet.

FIVE years ago...I can't believe it's been that long...I built the Grand Truss table and benches for a client, followed by the Grand Rustic-X buffet.  This spring she contacted me to ask if I was still building, and if so...would I be interested in building a vanity for her??

This is the inspiration photo she sent me.  Isn't it gorgeous?? I love the top-mount sink and that gorgeous tile wall!  And barn doors---oh, how I've wanted to do something with a barn door! 

I warned her up front that I had NOT built anything with barn door before, but I was willing to try if she was willing to take a risk on me!

Thankfully she was also very flexible on timing.  My spring/summer/early fall were all crazy!  So this project got delayed until the second half of October, and I spent two weeks living in the garage until it was done.

The barn door hardware is the SmartStandard barn door hardware kit from Amazon.  Yes, there are lots of DIY hardware tutorials out there...but this kit matched the look of the inspiration piece SO well.  The only issue was that it was made for 60" and the client wanted the vanity to be 50"...so it did require some hardware surgery.


Did you catch the fact that I only had a PICTURE to go off of to build this piece??   A picture, a length, and a depth.  That was the sum total of my instructions. 



I sketched out the barest details (thank goodness it was a simple design), plugged in some measurements and constructed a basic cut list.  Ordered the hardware and away I went!




















The frame was a simple box, mainly made out of stock 2x4s.  Based on the inspiration photo, the shelves sit on top of the horizontal supports between the legs (see right), but I trimmed them with 2x2s.  You can see how they sit above the level of the shelf supports.

It gives the impression that the shelves are notched out to fit around the legs, but they are really separate pieces.  I cut down 2x6 lumber to make the shelves--both to get rid of the rounded edges and get the width that I needed.  I did the same thing to make the countertop, and the boards are all held together with pocket holes.

Pictures are a little few and far between.  October days in a garage in the Pacific Northwest are not the best photo-ops.  I worked on applying the finish, and had to sand down the whole top and start again with stain about twice.  Despite applying pre-stain conditioner, the stain didn't want to "take" evenly.

I was pretty nervous about putting the barn door hardware all together.  It's VERY bulky, and I was worried about it clearing the countertop just right (it did), but when I hung the doors--I encountered another problem.

When I hung the doors AT THE MEASUREMENTS SPECIFIED in the instructions...There was about an inch gap between the frame and the doors.  It bugged me.  A lot!!  I ended up putting a second trim piece behind the doors to hide the gap.  In the end--it will probably be for the best, as it will help hide pipes under the sink.

You can see they look much better (no gap!) on the finished product.

I had to play a little bit with staging, since I don't have a sink to put on top of it....

And I apologize again for bad pictures and bad lighting (not that I could do much about that one).

I'm anxious for my client to finish her bathroom so I can see what it will look like in her space!  Although I do think it also makes a nice console...entertainment center...buffet...whatever!

But I think it turned out pretty close to the inspiration photo, don't you think?

Union Jack Dining Table

I feel lately as if I have been “jack of all trades and master of none.”  I’ve had a million things going on at once, and it doesn’t seem like I’m FINISHING anything.  Or…if I am finishing anything…I’m not doing a very good job of it.  Ugh!

But am I popping in this afternoon to show one thing that IS done and that I AM happy with!

A couple of months ago I purchased a table at a thrift store because it was on great, chunky turned legs. 

It wasn’t as big as I wanted it to be, so I pulled off the legs to use for another future table project.   You can see the top wasn’t in great shape, but it was certainly salvageable—so I did just that!  I stripped and sanded it down to bare wood.

I built a new table base out of stock lumber.  I’ve  had some questions about what the underside of my tables look like—here’s a peek.  I put in some cross-braces of 2x2’s to hold everything square and sturdy.

I also played around a little bit with my table legs, cutting each with a single taper.  I really like how they turned out!

Then I got a little crazy with painter’s tape!  Sorry; I didn’t take a picture of that part!  I used a reference picture, a ruler, and a straight-edge and pretty much “winged it.”  This is how it looked right after two colors of stain were applied (Minwax Dark Walnut and Mahogany).

The next day I stained the whole thing with that custom gray-brown mix that I am fond of.  As much as I liked the bold colors—there were definitely spots were there was a little bit of bleeding under my tape.  The new stain helped blur the boundaries a little bit, as did distressing the heck of of the whole thing!

And this is what I ended up with…

My kids are the biggest fans of this table (mostly because they’re big fans of Dr. Who and Sherlock) and keep asking, “Can we keep it??”

I am tempted…but I’m afraid not!  So hopefully it will soon find the home of another Anglophile to reside in!

Linking up here:

	Elizabeth & Co.
Primitive & Proper
Friday Remodelaholic	The Scoop!
Funky Junk’s Saturday Night Special	The DIY Show Off Miss Mustard Seed
Beyond the Picket Fence
Knick of Time
Common Ground	My Repurposed Life
	Mod Vintage Life

The Incredible Shrinking Table

I have been working on another Farmhouse Table for a dear friend over the last couple of weeks.  It is allll-most done.  I think.  It’s way  more stressful to build for someone you know, you know??  Anyway, I am anxiously waiting for my daughter to get home so she can help me haul it in the house so I can finish poly-ing and wax-ing it.  It’s about 45 degrees outside, and things are taking too long to dry!

Anyway, working on this latest table (#9, if we’re keeping count), reminded me that I never showed table #8.  That’s probably because it is nothing really new or different than the other farmhouse tables I’ve built…but also because the blasted thing drove me crazy.

Back before Thanksgiving, I realized I had enough leftover wood to make a table base.  So with only a few extra dollars (OK, maybe $50) to buy wood for a top, I could make another table to fill my empty dining room.

And so I did.  I assembled the base, the top, brought them inside and put them together…

But something was wrong.

If you really look closely at the two preceding pictures, you might be able to see it.  The breadboard ends were crooked!  I have no idea how it happened, but both of the ends took off at a slant.

I tried to convince myself that it reeeally wasn’t that noticeable.  I actually tried to sell it, at a significant discount, but I couldn’t sell it without pointing out the flaw—and big surprise, no one wanted to buy it then!

So what’s a girl to do??  Well, I ignored it until a few weeks after Christmas.  We actually had people sitting at it for Christmas dinner, and we built a puzzle on it…and it continued to drive me crazy.

So my nice big table got shrunk!  I took it back outside and disassembled it.  I removed the offending breadboard ends completely, and then I cut down the aprons on the long sides of the table by about 9”.

I was left with a petite farmhouse table!

It sold more easily this time, because I didn’t feel I had to apologize for it!

Oh, and did you notice my cute little bentwood bistro chairs?  I picked them up at Ruffles & Rust a few weeks ago.  I think they’re keepers! 

Now I just have to build a table to go with them! 

Triple Printers Console Cabinet

There was a strong temptation for me to entitle this post:  “She’s not dead.  Not yet.”  (And if you know what movie character I’m paraphrasing, you get 10 Chicken Points.)

It has been a very looonnnngg while since I’ve posted, or even been particularly active on the blogs at all.  I seem to have been part of the “where does blogging fit into my life” club…as I’ve found several other bloggers who have also taken long breaks, trying to answer that question!

I think I just managed to burn myself out a little between a summer market, a fall market, and Christmas signs for two shops and one small show.  Then there were Christmas preparations…and finally, a break!  It was delightful.  I loved that week after Christmas where there was really nothing I had to do!  Do you ever feel that way?

With shows and special orders out of the way for a while, I decided to tackle a “home” project…our family room.  When we moved in here (just over a year ago), the family room was the room where we put everything that we couldn’t figure out another place for…it became the dumping ground.  The kids used the room because it was where the TV was, but I almost never went in there, even to watch a movie…I hated everything about it!

So in the past few weeks, it has been my happy-although-at-times-frustrating task to make it in to a more useable, functional, and pretty place for our family to use.  I’ll share some “before” pictures at another time, but for tonight, I just thought I’d share my one major “build” for this room.

I fell in love with Ana White’s Triple Printers Console plans when they first appeared more than a year ago.  It was one of the first items I “pinned” for inspiration to my Family Room Pinterest board (if you visit, you might find some other hints of what is going on in this room).

I knew I wanted a painted finish, however, more like the Pottery Barn Dawson Media Console, and this is what I ended up with (the picture above looks a little greener than real life, I think).  First I stained the whole cabinet with Rustoleum American Walnut stain, then I painted with a DIY chalk paint made with sample pot of Valspar Perfect Storm.  After some heavy distressing, I glazed it all with more stain, then used MMS wax in both regular and dark to protect it all.

This was a challenging build in some ways—namely, the cabinet doors.  There is more of a gap around them than I would like, but it doesn’t bother me as much now that I’ve lived with it for a while.  I discovered that you should NOT buy the cheapest hinges you can find because, well….they’re cheap.  At 22” wide, these door are heavy, and cheap hinges tend to sag…and there’s nothing you can do about it.  I may be a little bitter about that. 

One of the things that made this a simpler build, however, was that I splurged for Select Pine.  It’s significantly more expensive, but SO lovely and smooth—hardly any sanding required!  I still had to hunt…and hunt….and hunt some more (at two different stores)…to find straight 2x2’s, but once I did, it was easy to build nice and square with those perfect corners.

I omitted the center drawer and just put in a shelf to store the DVD player and the Wii console.  Then my other splurge was to buy three Flipworks DVD trays through Amazon.  Each rack screws directly onto the shelves, but then slides out so you can access all of your movies.  We have stored our DVDs in IKEA boxes for a long time, and you had to go through every box to find the movie you wanted (yes, I’d considered labeling the boxes, but there’s no point when you have 6 children who never put anything away properly).

I adore all the label pulls, which I purchased from D. Lawless Hardware (they are VERY reasonably priced!).  I really have no plans to put actual labels in them….I think they are pretty just the way they are!

This new console is really the focal point of the whole room, and it makes me happy every time I walk in there—a far cry from how I used to feel!  I am still anxious to get everything put together so I can show off the room, but it is coming together…piece by piece!

 

Thanks to Someday Crafts, Elizabeth & Co., My Repurposed Life, and Domestically Speaking for featuring this project!

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Linking up here:

The Inspiration Exchange	Elizabeth & Co.
Primitive & Proper	Thrifty Décor Chick
Friday Remodelaholic	The Scoop!
Funky Junk’s Saturday Night Special	The DIY Show Off Miss Mustard Seed
Beyond the Picket Fence	Coastal Charm
Knick of Time	Domestically Speaking
Perfectly Imperfect
Common Ground	My Repurposed Life
From My Front Porch to Yours	Mod Vintage Life