Dining Room Pantry - Reveal

It's been a busy weekend around here at our home. Between finishing the Pantry, having friends over complete with a homemade dinner consisting of Fried Rice, Lumpia, Sweet N Sour chicken and Chocolate Cookie cheesecake [Oh... I know], saving a chipmunk from the wrath's of the evil neighborhood cat and creating a little space for Lola [more on that later], we can't even believe it's Monday already! [Which im happy to report we BOTH have the day off today, w00t!].

Anyways, if you remember my post from Friday, I talked a little about our Closet Pantry that is located in the Dining room. Just to re-cap, When this house was originally built [back in the 50's] the dining room was just that -a dining room. Than over the years the owners family grew and he needed the extra space, so from what I gather, they added a closet to the dining room and so it became a bedroom. Than years later it was reverted back to, once again, a dining room... *complete* with closet and bi-fold doors.

Here is the previous before, before the actual before [if that didn't confuse you]. Since our house did not have any sort of 'Pantry' we decided to just go ahead and use the closet that was in our dining room as the Pantry.... for now. This photo was taken while standing in the Kitchen, so you can see that it's not that far from where we do all the cooking... etc.

Here is the 'actual' before. The 'Before' after we moved everything in the house and used the closet as a Pantry. Josh built some shelves in the closet Pantry because originally it was just a hollow 'closet'. As you can see it serves the purpose pretty well. As you can also see only two shelves were painted and two were not... I ran out of paint, what can I say...

After doing a complete overhaul this weekend, what transitioned from this, turned into now this...

I wanted to create a Pantry that could be exposed, but without showing all of the 'clutter' that you saw in the previous photo. I wanted the dining room to feel like a dining room... not just a dining room with a closet.

Note: The shelves may look uneven, and I know it looks disturbing, but because we have an older home, we have the 'old' character that comes with it, and that is unevenness. The shelves are actually leveled for the pantry, but because the floor is slightly uneven to the rest of the floor in the main room, the shelves 'appear' to be off level, but in reality they really aren't... Think 'Optical Illusion' haha.

For can storage Josh made these cute little wooden crates, than we stained them with just one coat of Minwax Polyshades in Antique Walnut. I was going to paint them white but than Josh put in the idea of just staining them to kind of balance the wood tones out in the room and not have everything white.


See... I knew I kept him around for something! ;)

I placed my cookbooks that were once located on top of the Fridge to the second shelf. Along with some 'essentials' which I placed in some extra-large glass jars.

Notice the stripes on the wall? I used some of the leftover paint from Jayden's painted tree to create the stripes. At first I wasn't sold on them, but after the whole project came together, they started to look more and more balanced with the space.

If your wondering where I placed the appliances from the before photo, I placed them inside the Buffet-style hutch located on the opposite wall, and brought out my glass and white ceramic dishes that were [inside] the hutch, onto the 3rd shelf.

And because im feeling festive, I will show you some of the other changes I have done/created.

I kept our yellow-flower wreath up [it's actually a 'spring time' wreath] because of the yellow tones, which remind me of Fall. Added my Dollar store Crow-bird for a little pop of 'creepiness'.

The pumpkin candle holder I had since I lived in my first apartment [pre-hubby and pre-baby]. I bought two of them at the time and originally they were a bright orange with yellow with a little green added in. I decided to spray paint them with some nice crisp white, since my tastes now do not incorporate that 'so bright you need sunglasses' orange.

Next up are the seat cushions. Before they were a green, but I had a one paneled curtain that I have never used, in a shade of blue that matched the blue in the rug. So I decided to change them out and they look so much better than the green, for sure!

Not sure if you noticed my 'Drink and be Merry' photo. This was a simple design made using Photoshop. I came up with the saying because when I first met Josh, he used to say it all the time whenever a whole bunch of friends would come over to hang out and drink... of course back than the actual saying he used was 'Drink and be Merry Bitches'..[haha].. but of course I'm not about to hang the politically correct word used for a female dog on my dining room wall [although it would be funny to see the look on the mother-in-laws face if I had muahaha]. So I dropped the 'Bitches' and added 'Eat'. Simple enough :)

And lastly, I took two of the dining room chairs away and replaced them with some chairs that I scored at an Antique Flea-market about a year ago [$20.00 for the pair], just to kind of give the space some extra 'character'.

All in all I am happy with the room now. I especially enjoy the exposed 'Pantry'. The dining room feels like a dining room now, and not just a dining room with a 'closet' and I'm happy that we now have a space that can add character to the dining room but be used as our pantry. 

Next up- A box for Lola's doggy food :)

Sugar, Spice and .... Paint?

When we bought our house we were kind of puzzled as to why there was a closet in the dining room. Ya know, the traditional style closet with bi-fold doors. From what we were told [Our Realtor told us she knew the owners from a couple of years prior], the dining room started out as a dining room, than the owner turned it into a bedroom because he had a fairly large family and needed the extra rooms. The the next owner after him turned it back into it's original purpose. A dining room.

So now we have a formal dining room with a closet. What we didn't have was a Pantry, and boy do we need a pantry! So in the end the fact that our dining room had a closet wasn't so bad after all and the fact that the dining room is right off the kitchen makes it even more of a good idea to turn the dining room closet into a pantry.

Up until now this is what our 'Pantry' has looked like. Pretty simple, messy and just that... a place for food storage and extra Kitchen gadgets.

The shelves Josh added a few weeks after we moved in. We were tired of rummaging through boxes of canned goods and spices, so he built some simple shelving. Very sturdy simple shelving. I than painted two shelves before I ended up running out of paint [that was 7 months ago... I KNow!] and up until now I haven't had the chance to grab some new paint, that and I always seemed to forget [I tend to do that sometimes].

So I completely cleared all of the mess contents from the 'Pantry' so I could finish painting the shelves and also the wall within the Pantry itself.

On a side note, I know the shelves look ridiculously uneven, but with the comforts of living in an old home, come the joys of uneven floors. The shelves really are leveled for the closet pantry however. 

Luckily I had JUST enough Valspar- Mount Pilier white [which is what the actual dining room is painted in] to finish the entire inside part of the Pantry.

Next up is to finish painting the shelves white. I have some ideas for the wall, one of which is 'drying' as we speak... although im not sure if im 'sold' on it just yet.

Other ideas I have cooking away in my brain are to removed the bi-fold doors [because honestly they just seem to bedroom-ish for me, and after all this IS a dining room] and organize all of our stash within baskets, glass jars and other 'easy on the eye' display wares.

Do you have a Pantry? Do you like exposed pantry items, or items that can just be stashed away quickly and out of view?