Mt. Pleasant Classical Academy

In the hallway between the kitchen and the dining room is a nice kitchen pantry. Except it always looks like this:

The door is ALWAYS open, the shelves are always full, and there’s all this wasted space. The closet is 24″ deep but the shelves are 12″ deep. What a waste of space!

Oh, and the other reason the doors are rarely shut is because there’s stuff on the closet floor and usually there is something in the way. Plus the doors do not slide easily and they fall off their slides. All the time. We talked about just putting deeper shelves into this closet and replacing the door slides but it still would have been a pit. An organizational nightmare trying to retrieve something 2′ back and in a dark, unlit closet.

We had a better solution in mind. First everything had to come out of this closet.

It went onto the school room floor.

My do I have lots of food stored away! The closet is totally emptied, the header is removed, and see that extra foot of space I just gained! Well it was there before but I couldn’t put things there that I wanted to retrieve anytime in this decade.

The hallway lamp is removed.

Over the previous weeks DH built the cabinet unit, and earlier in the morning we had moved the unit off the sawhorses and onto these dollies. Sorry, no pictures since we were all busy working. But the unit was easily wheeled to our front door:

The plan was to just lift the unit and move it into the house but it was way too heavy. The drawer units were removed and our neighbor Mike stopped in to help. Even without us asking him to. We have great neighbors!

With the drawers removed the unit was rather light (HAHA, I don’t think these guys would have said that.)

SK and Mike worked together to slide it into the hallway and lean it this way and that.

They pushed some more.

and finally it could be slid into place. DH spent the next several hours getting everything level, installing some other stuff that just will give him something to nail trim boards to sometime in the future. Isn’t it just beautiful! Later on cherry doors will be put on too. That will really make it beautiful.

The open area above the pantry will also have a door. My plan is to store paper towels, TP, wrapping paper there. It will be up and out of the way but also quite easy to get to.

There are three individual sections that roll out and each can hold up to 500# of goods on those rollers. DH knows how to build! The shelves are totally adjustable and removable.

Finally the shelves were in place and I went to work filling them.

The engineer in me must share that my closet space went from 30 sq ft of shelf space to 58 sq ft! Guess it is time to move all those kitchen gadgets stored in the basement to the kitchen. And probable do a run to the warehouse club to buy some more good items.

I also didn’t know that I had so many cans of tuna, or 3 open bottles of oil, or so many cartons of crackers…..  I LOVE the new pantry.