HOW TO RE-ORGANISE & RE DESIGN A PANTRY
I will be the first to admit that having a pantry door is a blessing and also a curse.
Knowing that I could hide my 'secret' mess behind closed doors was like taking Valium to reduce my anxiety when guests where coming over and we were in need of entertaining them. Don't get me wrong, it's not like we ever said 'Welcome! Here is our pantry, look at it!' but I was very aware that we needed to stay clear from the 'war zone' area after I had been food prepping all day just in time for dinner - you know the deal, badly opened ingredients and equally badly sealed packages. Peculiar smells lurking from the bin - maybe even from the bottom shelf which had not been looked at since 2014.
To say the least it made the cooking experience a lot more dreadful in our everyday life. We often forgot ingredients at the back of the shelves that we couldn't see unless we moved the first three rows OUT of the pantry. And let's be honest, there was enough room on the shelves to keep cramping things for another 2 years (at least).
We over spent on buying staples that we didn't know we already had. And most of all, it made planning our weekly menu a time consuming experience, trying to figure out what we could cook with what we had bought only a week before. Our budget needed to stretch a little and this made it incredible difficult: the unknown products hiding at the back of each shelf that hadn't seen light for a long, long time.
So, 2017 was a year of change; as I was hosting Christmas Eve dinner for the first time in my house. I was trying to figure out how much money I needed to spend at Ikea re-organising my pantry. This 'small thinking' only gave me more hot flushes - knowing that it would only be a temporary fix. Money down the drain, basically.
And then I had it. On the 23rd of December 2017 I grabbed a hammer and ripped out all the shelves in the pantry. I hammered it like I was killing a demonic creature that had been hunting me for years. And all the time, I was thinking: I'm destroying a perfectly good pantry - a pantry that we paid to have built in when we first build our home!
But that was exactly our problem. When we paid our builder to build our home, our pantry and closets were the least of our concerns.
It was only until a few months later, after the move, that I started realising how poorly designed these closets spaces were - and maybe, if we had thought about it during our build, we would have made something ourselves, prior to moving in.
But we can't travel back in time and if we could I surely wouldn't be traveling back to fix a stupid pantry!
Nonetheless, the problem was persistent enough for me to release all me yearly stresses into hammering every shelf down.
And it felt good.
I felt liberated. And knowing that I would not have a pantry on Christmas Eve, actually made me happy. I could put all my groceries in temporary bags and use them as I was progressing with the cooking. It was much easier to clean up afterwards. A lot easier than my now destroyed pantry.
And so my three week holiday project started - and I took my time, thinking, designing and figuring out how to maximise the space, without sacrificing freshness and openness.
The gods of pantries would only know, how happy I am that I took this Small Reno Project on.
It is perfect. For us. For me. Because now, I don't leave that door closed, but proudly opened. I know exactly what products are in there and what we need when we are doing our weekly shopping trip.
And most of all, it is not an eye sore. It is an add on design to our kitchen. It has made our kitchen look bigger because now the storage space belongs there. It is part of it.
Choosing a timeless design and neutral colours, will keep the pantry up to date with the rest of the house, which is a contemporary design - timeless and classic. But most of all, clean.
Photo Gallery:
Interested in doing this yourself?
Here is the step by step Video. Not for the faint hearted. Working in a closed environment like this will cause some headaches along the way. Not only inside the pantry but the kitchen or the near by surrounds - everything will get dusty!!!
But - it is a worthy project. A long and exciting project that will leave you with the pantry of your dreams!
