Our Pantry Conversion Phase 1

This week was eventful on the home front. A simple 2 hour project turned into a three+ day situation with several trips to the hardware store and a lot of cursing. When all was said and done, the results were fantastic!

I had started the week with the thought of pulling everything out of the kitchen closet, repainting it from a dark pink (which was in style at some point in history) to a clean white and then reorganizing it so I could properly use the closet. When we first moved in, we started putting everything we didn’t want the cats to get into in the closet. At first, it started with stacking things and eventually, we would open the door, chuck something in and close it quickly. When I opened the door to start my project, this is what it looked like.

Hey! Don’t judge me! I have organization issues sometimes…

Nevertheless, I thought– I’ll pull everything out, repaint, organize everything useful and remove what wasn’t.

Then Tim walked by and said, “Hey, whatcha doing?” I explained my plan and he suggested we think bigger. He asked me what I REALLY wanted to do with this space. I said, ideally, I’d like to convert it into a pantry. We started to scheme at this point and we talked about what he’d like and what I’d like and decided to convert this closet into an open pantry.

So, I pulled everything out of the closet. As I did that, I couldn’t believe how many half used cleaning products I had. If I couldn’t find something (and how could you in this mess!) I would purchase a new one– and the wasteful cycle would begin. I also noticed that I’ve gotten VERY lazy with my plastic bag consumption. I get some plastic bags because we use them to clean the littler boxes. Did I mention we have 4 cats? Yep. So plastic bags are necessary to some extent– but this is ridiculous! No more of that! Once I pulled everything out, I could get a good look at the color. Here it is