Painting a New Pantry

I did this project many months ago and am excited to be sharing it today. My mother-in-law moved last summer and was getting rid of some furniture. Unfortunately my husband and I drove our small car the 6 hours to her town so we were only able to take a few things back home. Luckily, I was able to snag two of these utility pantry's, disassemble them, and bring them home in the trunk.

The picture above is a stock photo from JCPenny where the pantry's were originally bought because I forgot to take a photo before I dissembled them. 

I love these pantry's because we have very little storage in our house. When I originally bought the house, I was single and had only a cat (Alfie), car and an apartment worth of pots and pans to my name. The thought of buying a home with a large amount of storage never really occurred to me. My little home had plenty for a single person but only my husband and I got married and combined two households full of kitchen appliances it quickly became apparent that there wasn't enough room to go around. We've struggle since then to find room for everything which has been both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it's led us to clean out and give away many of the items we don't need or use and a curse because, well, there just isn't enough room to go around. 

All that to say, these pantry's were going to be a major help...once I painted them. 

You see, red isn't really a color I decorate with in my house. I find softer colors more my style so I decided that before we reassembled the pantry I would need to paint them. So I set off to Home Depot to pick up some spray paint and get to work. 

My colors range from light blues, yellow, and gray in various shades. Our kitchen has gray walls that match the rest of the house with a layer of glitter over them (yes, glitter, and I love it!). The cupboards are white (in dire need of a new coat) and the back splash is a large piece of tin that brings a nice metallic shine. I decided to go with a robins egg blue for the pantry since they would stand out pretty big in our small kitchen. However, I couldn't find a robins egg that I really liked so I ended up getting the Rustoleum Seaside in Gloss.

I laid everything out in our garage and made sure to open the garage door to let the nice breeze in. I sanded everything down with a very coarse block of sandpaper which left red paint speckles all over my garage. I'm very thankful I put down the plastic sheet first!

It took me several days to spray paint these because I worked on them during nap time and wanted to give plenty of time for them to dry in between coats. It took about 2.5 coats for them to be perfect to my liking before I set them out to dry for another day. 

Once dry I reassembled them and set about to find a spot in my house to put them. 

This is the wall that we chose to put the pantry's on. As you can see we had our spices hanging here as well as the cutting board we got for our wedding. This is the only pantry that we currently have and it is composed of deep shelves, half of which we don't use daily because they're either too tall or too short. The light switch that you see isn't used for anything. We're not really sure what it, if anything, it connects to but we don't use it and thankfully the pantry was the perfect fit next to it. 

Super deep shelves

I didn't paint the back because I knew they wouldn't be showing. 

We set one pantry on top of the other and connected them with 3 large plates. One on either side and one of the back. We then connected it to the wall of our current pantry with a corner brace. 

 So much room! 

The end of a happy day!