$11 Pantry Makeover - SimplySwider.com
Uncategorized

$11 Pantry Makeover

Written by

Jason Carter

$11 Pantry Makeover

Pantry Makeover

All of those beautiful and organized pantries on Pinterest (like this onethis one, and this one) had me itching to get my hands on ours. When we originally painted the kitchen, I painted the outside of the pantry doors and replaced the knobs, but the inside was 100% original to the house including the peachy orange paint that used to be in the whole kitchen. A pantry makeover wasn’t exactly high on the priority list so from the get-go I knew there were two driving principals for this projects: I had to sneak it in between our higher priority porch makeover and it needed to cost basically nothing.

Pantry Makeover

Besides the horrible paint color I also had these problems to contend with:

  1. Dog food storage that didn’t fit under the shelf.
  2. Brooms and mops that flopped all over the place.
  3. Potatoes and onions rolling wherever they wished.
  4. Dark wood and dated striped contact paper.
  5. No storage for paper products.
  6. No rhyme or reason to the placement of any products.

Painting the pantry

Pantry Makeover
Pantry Makeover

To start with I removed all of the shelves and ripped off the old contact paper. It came off easy enough, but was still time consuming. I originally planned on recovering the shelves with the fun teal and white chevron contact paper, but not only would I have needed about 5 rolls, but according to the reviews the dark wood would have shown through the paper, so I decided to save some money and paint them instead.Next, I cleaned the shelves with my tsp substitute, then primed them once and painted them bright white.  The shelves were actually suppose to be the same mint green as the dining room, but  Cody took it upon himself to paint them while I was at work; and I just didn’t have the energy to re-paint them. While the shelves were getting painted I also painted the pantry walls white (Valspar Ultra white in semi-gloss).

Pantry Makeover

See how much brighter it looks already? You can also see that we bumped up the bottom shelf up about an inch so that the dog food storage could easily slide under the shelf now.  It’s hard to tell in this picture but I also painted the fronts of the shelves the mint green (B.M. Palladian) to give the space a little bit of charm.

Pantry Makeover Paste Finishing Wax

Before I started placing items back on the shelves I rubbed the shelves down with Paste Finishing Wax to make sure the paint didn’t get chipped up by cans or baskets being dragged across the shelves.

Pantry Labels

Pantry Makeover

Now that the pantry was painted, it was time for some organization, and I knew I wanted super cute labels for the baskets I had rounded up (here’s similar ones from one of my affiliates). I found these unpainted clipboards and chalkboards for $.88 a piece at A.C. Moore.

Pantry Makeover

They were a little plain, so I painted the clip boards the same mint as the shelf fronts, and gave the chalkboard a quick swipe of my favorite stain (Minwax Mission oak).

Pantry Makeover

Next, I hot glued the clip boards and chalkboard to the front of the baskets. I also used a white paint pen to label the chalk board.

Pantry Makeover

The most time consuming part of this project was creating the labels for the chalk boards. Mostly because I spent an hour deciding on fonts (something I’ll save you the hassle of). I made these in MS Word by creating a rounded rectangle slightly smaller than the clipboard. Next, I came up with a cutesy saying to describe the contents of each basket. The saying is in Lane-upper font while the contents are written in Moonflower bold. Once I got the look I was going for I printed them onto card stock and cut them out.

Pantry Makeover

Here’s how the labels look all put together. Aren’t they cute? P.S. all the baskets were orphans I had laying around the house after our move.

Pantry Makeover

For the produce baskets, I made circle labels in the same moonflower font that I attached to the baskets using old clothespins that had been painted mint on the front.

Pantry Makeover

One thing I really love about the clothes pins and clipboards is that it is super easy to change out the labels as our needs change.

Pantry Makeover

And Voila! It’s done. I spent some time moving things around to get the right feel/look, but I absolutely love it!

Pantry Makeover

If you are wondering where I spent the $11 it was mostly on this new broom and mop organizer which I bought at Target for $8.98 (here’s a similar one from my affiliate) I can’t tell you how nice it is to open the pantry and not have to fear getting hit in the head by a falling broom.

Pantry Makeover
Pantry Makeover

As I mentioned before all the baskets were cast-offs from our last house that had yet to find a place in the new house. The paint was also all leftover from other projects.

Pantry Makeover

I love that everything now has it’s own place, and that like items are now grouped together in the baskets.I’d still like to create labels for the glass jars holding my tea. Maybe something like this.

Pantry Makeover

Overall, I’d say not bad for $11! Actually, I’m so in love with my work that I keep opening the pantry and staring at it, Even more, surprising is that 2 weeks after taking these pictures, it’s still just as organized.

Leave a Comment