What we previously had in our pantry were a bunch of wire shelves which, if you have any experience with them, whilst they’re actually quite useful, they’re not designed for bottles and cans to sit on. One solution is to layer some card on the shelves for the bottles and cans. Another solution is to rip it all out and build something new.

Once you’ve got everything out, you’re left with an empty room. In our case, simple painted walls and not even any baseboards. When we had the house built a few years ago, we skimped on the paint for the walls and actually ran with left-over ceiling paint. It worked fairly well for five years, but it wasn’t designed for an area anywhere near as active as a pantry.

Once everything is out, except the trusty chest freezer which really can’t go anywhere else, there’s plenty of room to install the baseboards and get to work with the filler, sand paper, brushes and cans of light blue paint that the wife chose to adorn the pantry walls.

Personally, I wasn’t too much taken with the choice of the color to begin with. I’m something of a minimalist and I actually quite like white walls. I really like how the white of the ceiling and baseboards pops-out against the blue though.

I’m not entirely convinced that I did everything in the most sensible order, but I’m fairly confident that painting the walls first made the most sense. Mostly because this reduces the risk of splashing paint on newly fitted shelves, and I’ve discovered that painter’s tape does not prevent paint from getting on surfaces that I’m trying to protect.

One thing I’m now convinced about is that although my idea of establishing a datum line that I knew to be level was a good idea, it would have been best to install the cleats for the first shelf, checking for level as I went, and then use precut and measured spacers to establish the locations for the rest of the shelves. I put a little too much confidence in my leveling and measuring accuracy, with the end result being errors in the order of about 1/2″ over eight or so feet.

More than I would have liked.

Another effort that I’d made was to mark the locations of the studs all the way up the walls. This wasted more time than I’d realized. It would have been much better to simply locate the studs for each cleat as I went, which is what I would up doing anyway.

Doing that from the start would have saved time, painter’s tape and a fair amount of patience. But, as they say, hindsight is always 20/20.

At this point, all the shelves have been cut and installed, and are being supported with spacers that snugly fit between the shelves at the front and will pass the stress down either to feet at the floor or to brackets supporting the lower shelf of the stack.

Had I used precut spacers to separate the cleats, this would have been much more straightforward. However, the errors incurred meant that each spacer here needed to be custom cut to fit.

There not being much room to work in the pantry, especially with shelves that run wall to wall, occasionally the walls took something of a beating, making a bit of a mess of our hard work.

No big deal, however, it just took a little bit of a repair to bring it back into shape.

Once everything was done, the shelving was strong enough to support my weight without any complaint at all. The errors don’t show, the wall damage is completely repaired, and the shelves are ready to host all of the food stuff that we had pulled out of the pantry in order to get this project completed.

All in all I’m happy with the job. Not just that it’s over, but because if I saw a pantry like this in someone else’s house, I’d want one for myself.

All told, this project took a little over four weeks. One to get the pantry ready, one to get the cleats cut and installed, another to get the shelves cut and installed, one more to get the structural supports fitted, and finally a couple of days to get the walls repaired and the place cleaned up ready to be restocked.

All of which kept me away from my personally prioritized task of getting back to the second revision edit of The Old Man…