It is Week Two of the One Room Challenge hosted by Linda @ Calling it Home. This crazy challenge provides bloggers with the opportunity to transform a space in just 6 short weeks.
If you are new here…thank you for stopping by. My name is Tammy and Hey Fitzy is my happy place. As a mother of four crazy kids, I cherish everything home. From creating a beautiful and family friendly space to sharing a great recipe with friends, Hey Fitzy journals my crazy ideas as we work to turn chaos into comfort. Check out my About Me page if you want to learn more.
For this challenge I have decided to tackle our kitchen pantry. I am currently in what I will call the engagement phase…super excited and totally focused on planning for the big event. Unfortunately for me, the planning stage tends to be the most difficult. Sourcing everything and coming up with a plan is always a little daunting. Sometimes I have to tear everything out to create a blank canvas before I can start to create a vision. Then if I can’t find just what I am looking for…I tend to shift gears very quickly and alter my plan. Speaking of making a big plan, I’ve heard of a few people opting for an outside kitchen for their homes as it adds something extra and continues the flow of inside to outside, however, I’m not really at that stage yet, but it is intriguing. I love to plan (obviously) and I think something like that would take a whole lot of planning from deciding what colour the Outdoor Kitchen Cabinets are going to be, to picking out an outdoor oven that can weather any storms. I think I’ll just be focusing on the pantry for now, but watch this space as you never know.
I keep coming back to this beautiful image from Hayburn.com. I love the idea of incorporating drawers to hide all the odds and ends that a pantry tends to accumulate. With 3 kids still at home packing school lunches every day, it would be nice place to store school snacks and lunch box odds and ends. It is good to have a range of snacks available so that your kids get the nutrients they need. You also need to think about snacks for yourself too so you can get through the day, this can be from dried fruit and nut bars to teriyaki beef jerky which are full of protein. The baskets are also a great option to help with organization. Now let’s be honest, my pantry will never truly look like this. Rows of beautiful and perfectly aligned jars are not a reality in my house. But a girl can dream right! Maybe I can slightly have that dream by putting in some beautiful tea towels from websites similar to Spoonflower or check some in out in-store, so I can decorate the area in my own unique way, without going aesthetically crazy.
Another concept I will be using is the bead board wall behind the shelfs. We used real bead board in prior homes and I absolutely love it. But in this small space I believe it might be a little more challenging. I found a great alternative to real bead board…paintable wallpaper that looks like headboard. It is part of the Martha Stewart line at Home Depot and I am super excited to give it a try. The image above shows an example of the bead board wallpaper.
Another image I love is this pantry from HGTV. Again I love the use of drawers and am currently trying to figure out a way to incorporate drawers into my space. What I also love is the added detail of a stained shelf at counter level. This helps to break up the wall of white shelving and adds visual interest. I plan to include a stained shelf in my pantry.
So here is a not so pretty picture. Looking at it reminds me of another picture of a kitchen with Granite countertops that I had seen online, and the people who owned the kitchen did not have a pantry so they used their counters and some shelves above it to store all their items. I remember thinking “what a waste of such a beautiful countertop”, and deciding that I would need a spacious and well-organized pantry to keep the party out of my kitchen. So, back to the process, we emptied all the contents of the panty over to our kitchen buffet area. This was a great opportunity to really clean out several of the outdated items. It is amazing what lurks in the hidden depths of a pantry to be forgotten and thus never eaten.
Here is a picture of the empty pantry. We are currently in the process of taking all the old wire shelves out and patching the 72 (yes 72) holes in the wall.
Please stop back next week to see if we made any progress. 🙂
Last fall I had the opportunity to participate in the One Room Challenge. You can click here to see how I transformed our builder grade master closet into something both functional and beautiful!
One Room Challenge Week-by-Week
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