Between my dabblings in couponing and my lack of ability to keep things in their place (hello 2-year old!), our pantry is stuffed to the gills. We've been trying to think of ideas for this area for a while: More shelving? Built-ins? Starvation diet? Nothing seemed to be right, until my late night Pinterest browsings took me to ana-white.com, and a modified version of this:
We loved this because of the casters on the bottom of the shelves and the fact that it looked pretty easy and cheap. Cheap it was! Here's a run-down of what we bought:
9 scrap 4' pieces of 1x6: $.51 each
1 scrap 4' piece of 1x2: $.41
1-8' long 1x2: $1.97
1 caster: $2.38
1 pack o' screws: $4.97
2 packs of springy-type anchors: $2.97 each
We had the paint and spackle already, so that makes our grand total $20.26. We had a lot of screws left over, so provided we can find them again...........We can use them for our next project. ha.
Here's our starting point. It makes me cringe.
That's my sweet Anthropologie apron, which I only wear when I'm baking. Cooking is just not worthy of an apron, mostly because it happens in 30 minutes or less with at least one child either saying "hold me mommy" or "waaa!" or perhaps sitting on the counter attempting to open every spice jar within reach. But I digress.
I drew out the shelving, and the rest was Matt's doing. We were very lucky to find the scrap bin at Home Depot stocked full of the exact boards we needed, and because of making it two separate shelves we could use all scraps. Sweetness.
Why the two shelves? Wayyyyyllll.. We have these really great lever doorknobs. They're not only great for opening the door with your foot when you have your arms full of children and diaper bags and stuff, but they're great for the elderly and the very young to open doors and escape outdoors when you aren't paying attention. Naked. Guess which one I have experience with? Where was I? Oh yes. The lever doorknobs necessitated creating two separate units, or else we'd have a weird cutout, or it would have to be awkwardly off center, or too narrow to be of real benefit. So we chose two units.
He did it by cutting all his boards and building two basic bookshelves. He used the 1x2s on the front of the shelves to create a lip to hold stuff in, and also to hang the shelves. The anchors hold a piece of 1x2 to the door, and he screwed the shelves to the 1x2. Use good anchors! You really don't want a middle-of-the-night crash of your pantry falling apart. Because this is a hollow door, we put 2 strips of 1x2 for each shelf, and used the metal spring-type anchors instead of the plastic kind.
This really took about two weeks, start to finish, because we weren't really hard core on getting it done. You could easily finish this in a day.
Here's the final product. I'm pretty pleased. Some things we learned along the way? Make sure there's enough clearance between the shelf and the door when you're closing it. We had to make our unit a little narrower than originally planned because we wanted to be able to actually shut the door. Kind of important, I think. Also, measure twice, cut once. Measure twice, cut once. It's the reason for the half-shelf at the bottom, which actually turned out great for tall boxes. Sometimes serendipity favors the impatient.
We're thinking of doing this to pretty much every closet in the house now. In the original post she converted bifold doors, which is what we'd have to do. What do you think??
Did you have to reinforce the hinges?
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