We’ve been living a lie in the kitchen for some time. See, on the outside, everything looked pretty good.

Not done, but pretty good, right?

But if you open the doors, you’ll see that in fact, things don’t look good. They don’t look good at all.

Our pantry is a scary place right now.

But, we’re on track to getting that fixed. This week! (Fingers crossed!)

See, we built the pantry ourselves because we couldn’t find a pre-made cabinet that would perfectly fit our space. And because buying a pre-made, smaller cabinet would have been at least $1000 for just the basic box, no custom shelves or drawers. Not to mention it wouldn’t perfectly fit our space. Yikes, right?

So, Wyatt drew up the plans himself and built the basic pantry boxes.

Then, we painted them and got them installed.

We did purchase matching doors so everything looks perfectly matched with our cabinets.

But then, we just shoved all the food in there to get it out of our living room and kitchen floor. Remember this barrel of fun? Because I do.

Oh, and as a fun flashback, you’ll remember that this is what our pantry looked like before all this remodel business started:

It wasn’t that great before, huh?

And you’ll remember (maybe) that taking all the food out of pantry was the very first thing we did when we started this remodel back in the spring of last year. You can read that post, here... it’s crazy how things have changed since then!

And, that means we’ve been living with unorganized boxes and piles and stacks of random food containers since April 1 of last year. Holy smokes. No wonder my cooking habits and skills seem to have been washed down the drain. I mean, goodness gracious.

So, even though things have been looking pretty good from the outside, I’m been SO READY to tackle in the inside of the pantry. Because, it’s going to be nice to have a pantry that looks and functions something like this in the near future:

Moving on, here’s the sketch I put together of what we’re hoping the pantry will function like once it’s all built and organized:

(Wyatt pretty much let me design it however I wanted since I’m the one who’ll be using it most of the time, but he helped me determine all the best heights and functions of each shelf and drawer.) Then, he made an official building plan to follow.)

Oh, and the reason we didn’t go with pull out drawers all the way up was because they are over our heads, so we’ll have to use the step stool to see up there anyway, and what’s the point of a drawer that pulls out way above your head? It just seems dangerous to me. Hello falling food items, right? And, we don’t plan to store items we’re using a lot on those top shelves anyway. They’ll mostly be for spare staples (extra bags of flour and sugar, etc.) as well as some other random kitchen stuff (little-used appliances and paper plates, etc.)

Over the past few days and weeks, Wyatt has been plugging away at building the wooden drawers.

Last night, he said they were ready to install so I cleaned out the big open section of the pantry. It had looked like this:

Now, it’s ready to be organized:

Already better, right? Although the rest of our kitchen looks like this now:

Wyatt will be back to talk about the details of building the wooden drawers once they are all finished. In the meantime, the reason we went with DIY drawers over store-bought was exactly the reason we built the pantry box ourselves. Nothing came in the exact size we wanted and even the ones that were smaller than we needed were WAY expensive.

As in, we could buy one drawer, from here, for around $50 base price and have to add $50+ more to get it as large as we needed it to be. If you only needed the standard size, it might have been worth it, but not for our extra deep cabinet!

At over $100 a drawer, it was CLEAR Wyatt could make them cheaper. He’ll go over the price break down in his detailed post, but keep in mind we could build all our drawers from one sheet of plywood, which costs less than $100. Talk about savings!

We also looked at Ikea options, but decided they still weren’t the size we needed, and they didn’t seem to be as sturdy. They were pretty cost-effective though:

 

However, we did buy one Ikea bin to use for potatoes and onions. It wasn’t quite large enough, but was the best/easiest option we could find for a metal bin. And I think it will suit our needs just fine.

This is the first one Wyatt has worked on getting installed, and even though it’s not totally finished, I’m happy to say we’re moving in that direction. We’ll paint the wooden spacers  he had to install to make the slightly smaller bin fit in our cabinet.

I’m already getting super giddy to think about how nice it will be to have an organized pantry soon. I’ll actually be able to make a grocery list like an educated person. When Wyatt says, “do we have any new bottles of ketchup/jars of mayonnaise/cans of soup,” I’ll be able to answer! What a concept!

What have you all been working on? Any tips for organizing a pantry? Since I have to start from scratch in grouping items together and picking what shelves everything will go on, I’m all ears to any suggestions you have to share!