Pantry Goes From Dysfunctional to Completely Organized

Holy pantry space! This oversized pantry recently got a facelift and I’m here to share with you how we did it.

The Before

Disorganized and cluttered, things fell through the wire shelving. A very frustrating space that made me feel overwhelmed every time I walked in.

When my husband I bought our house we were shocked at the size of our new pantry. We’ve only ever had a small closet space to use. This pantry could easily fit bunk beds LOL!

The drab basic builder-grade white wire shelving was over twelve years old, dirty, stained, and not functional for adequate food storage. The vertical posts made it challenging to organize food and the open shelving caused things to fall through the cracks all the time.

What We Did

First, the wire shelving was torn out and the many, many holes left in the walls were patched.

We painted a fresh coat of Sherwin Williams Agreeable Gray SW7029 paint to the walls and I worked on the staining and adding a coat of Polyurethane to the wood shelves my husband cut and sanded. I used the Dark Walnut #2176 stain finish by Minwax.

The shelves vary in length according to the wall-length but are all right at 11” deep.

We spaced out all of the brackets and fit each shelf. This required us to trim some of the wood so it was a perfect fit.

One by one we spaced out the brackets determining how much height we wanted between shelf levels and the shelving space came to life. We maximized every square inch in this space!

Once all the shelves were up, the room overall felt more open and spacious, but the dark wood tone absorbed much of the light so we decided to also update the semi-flush mount light.

Voila, instantly more light!

The fun part began with a shopping trip to IKEA where I was able to source most of the storage bins. I found the clear bins on Amazon. You can download a free copy of all the products I used here.

I organized all the food and made my own vinyl labels with my Silhouette cutting machine.

You could certainly download free printable labels and print them on sticker paper or use a marker and handwrite them!