The 3 Trip Pantry

Glenn and I are blessed to have such a wonderful, large kitchen with TONS of cabinet space. In fact, none of the high cabinets have anything in them. Unfortunately for us though, we don't have a dedicated space for a pantry. Until now.

Most people with newer homes have an entire section of their kitchen dedicated to a pantry whether it be a small closet type space, a giant walk-in pantry, or a lovely section of floor to ceiling cabinets. We had neither, but we wanted something. Luckily for us, we are also blessed to have a kitchen that came from IKEA so all of our cabinet frames and doors (as well as countertops) are regular stock IKEA items. This meant that Glenn and I were able to create something that would be exactly what we wanted. IKEA has cabinets that are meant to be pantries. Unfortunately these cabinets are kind of a funny height and we really wanted our pantry to match up to the top of our refrigerator because it would be going directly next to it. This is where we had to get creative.

All of the wall mounted cabinets at IKEA are only 12" deep and we wanted something with more capacity. That led us to look at the base cabinets. These cabinets are 24" deep. Sounds great right? The problem here is that the base cabinets come in one height only, and that is 30". We needed 68" high. Okay... How about we stack two base cabinets on top of each other? That sounded like a good idea, except base cabinets don't come with a top because it is expected that you would add a countertop to it. We weren't planning on that. Instead I just flipped it upside down so that the open part of the top cabinet was lying directly on top of the open part of the bottom cabinet. That brings us to 60" tall. We needed 8" more. I was pretty sure that IKEA only made 4" legs, but I was wrong. They had some stainless steel 8" legs. That gives us our perfect height!
So right about now you might be thinking, "Well great! They figured out their pantry, so what's the problem? And why does she call it a 3 trip pantry?" Well when we first bought all of our supplies to make the pantry, IKEA was closing so we were in a bit of a hurry. Everything looked fine and our prices seemed to add up to what we were expecting. That was Trip #1 However, when I went to assemble the pantry while Glenn was at work (in case you didn't know, I am the official furniture builder/assembler of the Darby household) I noticed something was off. The frame itself came together beautifully, but the doors were wrong. Doubly wrong. Not only were the doors about 4" too long, they weren't even the right style! UGH.
IKEA can be pretty draining on a person so we didn't go and return our doors right away, but instead waited a week or so. We ran in with our incorrect doors and got store credit to go get the right ones. In case you are wondering, IKEA is fantastic with returns. It's a completely painless process. We went over to the right section and grabbed the proper doors after triple checking to make sure they were right. That is Trip #2.

A few days or so after our most recent trip I began to attach the hinges to the doors to prepare them for mounting on the cabinet. I had installed the set of shelves we bought in the top cabinet only. I then realized that we didn't have everything we would need again. Shelves wouldn't be feasible for the bottom portion of the pantry because the depth would make it too hard to see the contents. Instead we thought drawers would make a good addition. I wanted to get the normal solid bottom drawers but they require special hardware for the hinges and we didn't want to do that. I checked the IKEA website and found that they have wire baskets for the size we wanted (we also have wire baskets in a couple other kitchen cabinets) so we decided that those would have to work. That left me with a still unfinished pantry. This was getting a little old.
Finally this weekend we made our 3rd and final trip to IKEA.
We picked up 3 wire basket drawers and a pair of half size shelves to create better visibility on the top portion of the pantry. Today I installed the drawers and the half shelves.

I also drilled holes for and installed the front of door hardware. Luckily for us, the previous homeowners had a leftover door handle in its original packaging that we were able to match on one of our trips to Lowes. Now everything matches perfectly.

We are really happy with our pantry. I'm quite thrilled actually. It's also a pretty big relief to have it done considering it has sat half finished for about a month now. Now you understand why I call it "The 3 Trip Pantry."