Sorry about the silly April Fool’s joke yesterday, guys. I couldn’t resist a little fun. But in all seriousness, yes we officially started the kitchen last night.

Of course, what we did wasn’t all that exciting. It involved making a giant mess, though, so that’s always fun, right? Well, not really if the mess means storing all your food in boxes and crates for the next several months. Ugh.

Yep, we unloaded the pantry last night because before we can order our cabinets, we had to remove the pantry from the wall and see what was hiding back there.

And as it turns out, it’s a good thing we did go ahead and tear into the wall…because we already found hiccop number one.

Yup. This project is already officially fighting back. (A term I picked up from my years of helping my dad fix up their 100+ year old farm house, despite the many struggles the house put up against said improvements.)

I’ll let Wyatt jump in tomorrow with a post about just exactly what our first stumbling block is. (He’s way better at explaining technical things like structure and supports…) In the meantime, though, here’s how we got started on the project.

First, I grabbed as many big cardboard boxes as I could find from our basement.

For the dishes, we’re planning to use these big Rubbermaid totes I borrowed from my sister. But I didn’t want to dig through layers and layers of food to find items so I went with smaller boxes that we could organize into categories and types of food for, hopefully, an easier time of managing without a pantry.

Side note: we have a lot of food…sheesh!

To remove the pantry from the wall, we began by removing any pieces that could be detached. First, we took out all of the shelves and their holders to make more working space.

Then, it was time to start removing screws.

Then we removed the doors and hinges. I am considering using pieces of the doors for the new pantry. Mainly the cubbies on the inside of the door.

After the doors were removed, Wyatt removed the screws that were anchoring the pantry to the wall. There were 3 on each side.

With the anchors removed, we were ready to take it out of the wall. Unfortunately, the various coats of paint pseudo-glued the pantry in place. Wyatt used a flat pry bar to break it free. You could also probably use a knife to score where the pantry met the wall.

Finally, it was free! Wyatt needed my help pulling it out of the wall, so no pictures of this process. But it’s out now!

And it’s now sitting in the middle of our living room. Time to get moving on step 2!

Again, since we’ve already found out that part of our plan won’t work, we’re ready to hit the books again to come up with a new plan. Ever have a project go wrong on the first day before? Yikes!

Also, no jokes about this…there’s a $50 Target giftcard giveaway going on here. It’s open through Friday at midnight, and you can get up to three entries each! Don’t miss out on this awesome opportunity to win some cash to spend at Target! I don’t know about you, but I can find a lot of stuff I’d like from Target with $50, am I right?

Go enter now!