Building a Pantry

When you walked into our house the day we moved in, you would see a coat closet in the entryway. Now, I have never understood the logic of a coat closet in Arizona. Never. I own one coat . . .that I wear one week a year when I go visit you all in Utah. This was the closet. (Pretend like Max is walking out the front door in this picture and you get an idea of what the entryway looked like before my ideas caught up with it.)

It was the one closet that didn't look used in the house.

Now on the other side of the coat closet (or more specifically, directly behind the back wall of the coat closet) was a set of very shallow cupboards, not even a foot deep. Those shelves were in the laundry room right next to the kitchen. (Oh, look! There's a shot of the old french doors to the left!)

 So I thought, "Self, would you rather have a coat closet or a pantry?" And then I laughed because that was a stupid question. Gary thought I was crazy for wanting him to do this, though. He has since been converted (to my insanity). We ripped out the shelves, and bashed out the back of the coat closet, like so:

 In the picture below you see where Gary ripped out the drywall on the wall to the right (see the studs?) and removed a pocket door that was right next to the closet. The closet doesn't exist anymore and you can see straight through past the 2x4 boards that used to be the back of the closet to the laundry room light switch (and utility sink on the left):

 This is what my entryway looked like:

Gary cut the wall back on the left side of the entryway opening into the kitchen to be even with the former closet wall. Then he framed out the new opening like so:

 And then he added drywall over where the coat closet had been like this:

 (In the picture above you can see the new drywall on the left). Then texture and paint and whala! No more closet in the entryway (it had been on the wall to the right in the picture below):

Then Gary had to build the pantry. He covered all the studs with drywall again, but with the opening on the other side of the hole:

 And there was just cement floor still (we have since added dark grey tile in the laundry room and pantry)

 We had workers texture and paint the hole. Then Gary built me DEEP shelves and painted them. We were originally going to make it a walk-in pantry, but it wasn't really large enough to do that and had more storage space if we did it this way:

 Then we ordered a door and painted it to match the other new doors in our house. I actually only wanted a frosted glass door, but the one with "pantry" and a picture of food came instead when I wasn't home and Gary didn't catch it when they delivered it.  Once I started painting the doors and caught the mistake I was too tired to argue with Lowes to get plain frosted glass.

 See? Tons of storage space right off the kitchen. Waaaay better than a coat closet. Thanks, Gary!