52 Projects – Week Four – Pantry Storage Boxes

I’m slowly working towards my 52 projects around the house – this might be a tough goal to accomplish. Weekends seem to fly by and before we know it, Monday is knocking on our door.

But, I’ll give it my best shot – and I’d rather have less projects I’m happy with than more projects that I’ll end up redoing. Quality versus quantity, right?

The next project in my ‘series’ is an idea I had after seeing this pantry redo

What’s not to love? And you know what I loved most – the boxes on the shelves. They added some rustic charm to the pantry and made it seem more part of the house instead of ‘just a pantry.’

But, finding boxes like that around here proved impossible. To me, anyway. Maybe they exist, but not anywhere that I knew about. So I made my own – with a lot of help from Mr. E.

We used inexpensive supplies that we picked up from Home Depot:

I played around with the sizing of the boxes on paper, to make sure they would fit on our shelves, and fit beside each other. 7” wide was the magic size for the small boxes.

So we measured twice (or more) and cut one box to make sure it would work properly.

Once we knew it would work, we began the first assembly line step – cutting the pieces. We ended up with a lot because I wanted six small boxes.

I also loved the colour of my inspiration boxes, so the next step was the long, slow process of staining all the pieces of wood. They’re pine, so they took the stain quickly. It just took a LONG time – a few evenings of staining, waiting and wiping. I took over the kitchen table for about a week while everything dried (good thing we have an island that we could eat at!)

  

Since it’s winter here, and we had the weekend without kids, we assembled the boxes in the house.

The compressor stayed in the garage, so the nail gun wasn’t very loud. And we didn’t freeze in the garage. J

Once we got the hang of putting the boxes together, they didn’t take long.

I added some vinyl letters that I cut with my Slice. I think it makes the pantry look more personalized, and everyone can find things in the boxes this way.

So, what do you think?

 

This was a time consuming project, but I think the time we put in was definitely worth it. These will help organize those items in the pantry that took up a lot of space.

Now, just to organize the pantry so these will fit on the shelves!

Cheers! Kim