Pantry Makeover

There's a walk-in pantry in the kitchen that Wendy and I have wanted to clean and organize for the past three years. It was a simple matter of removing a door, stripping and oiling the remaining doorway, scraping old paint, weatherproofing a window, caulking/plastering to our hearts' content, adding some leveling concrete, then painting and adding some Ikea shelving. Sometimes I wonder why we didn't do it sooner :)

Here's how the kitchen started, with a tower of cabinets next to the pantry door.

This was the view upon opening the door.

We added shelving to make the space usable, then worked on it over time. In this photo, the door frame and adjacent cabinet have been removed, and the original door frame has been sanded.

Eventually Wendy removed the white plaster from the stones on the left. I repaired the original door frame using sawdust and epoxy, then oiled it. The final step to fixing this area was pointing between the stones and also in the space under the doorframe.

A couple months ago we removed everything from the pantry so we could scrape the walls, plaster, caulk, repair the floor, and paint.

And voila! The finished pantry.

Renovating an old farm house has provided some good lessons in prioritizing needs and just accepting things as they are, knowing we will change them when we can. The old pantry was livable of course, but now we're actually happy with it.