To say that I was excited to have a pantry is an understatement. As a designer, of course I wanted it to be pretty, but more importantly, I wanted our pantry storage to be functional and manageable for our family of 5.
We left off with the bottom portion of the pantry complete. You can read about it here.
I knew that I wanted sturdy shelves that looked built in. I’ve built plenty of shelves before so I was confident that I could build these to my specifications. Since the bottom cabinets are 14″ deep and the countertop would be 15″ deep, I opted to make my shelves 10″ deep to accomodate containers and baskets.
To get started, I attached 2x2s to the back two walls making sure they were level and screwed into the studs.
I then added 7″ 2×2 supports to the side wall and the middle using wood glue and my Kreg Jig.
I then glued and screwed another 2×2 to the front of the supports.
Once the framing was done, I added a 1×10 to the top of the bracing and nailed it in place. I then glued and nailed a 1×3 to the front to give the shelves a finished look.
In full transparency, I made one shelf completely first to make sure it would work and be sturdy enough before I built the other two. Those two I built together at the same time.
I attached 1/4″ white hardboard to the bottom of the shelves with nails to complete the look. Then to make it look polished, I wood filled all the nail holes, caulked the edges, and painted everything white.
Are you ready to see the final result?
Here’s a closer look at some of the different sections of the pantry:
I can’t get over all the pantry storage we were able to add to the space!
Thank you for following along with this journey!
