It was meant to be a quick mini-renovation, but this has quickly turned into a much bigger project. For a while we had been planning to update the pantry over Easter weekend. It was 3 little cupboards and 2 open nooks and it drove me crazy trying to find things. I’d have to look in 5 spots to find anything! The plan was to get 2 tall cabinets to replace the 5 sections.

Our kitchen is an Ikea kitchen, so we thought it would be a fairly quick job. Pull out the old cupboards, head to Ikea for a pair of tall matching cabinets, come home and put them together and then put them in…easy! The picture above gives you a bit of an idea of how it looked at the start.

Well, as we started to pull out the old cupboards, we quickly realised that this was going to be a much bigger job. The DIY install the previous owners had done was worthy of an episode of Cowboy Builders! Most things were glued together…they had 1 screw if we were lucky! We were amazed the kitchen hadn’t fallen apart! We decided that we would be most comfortable ripping that whole side of the kitchen out and starting from scratch. That way, we knew the job would be done right.

After a lot more demolition work, we got it all back to bare studs to start fresh…just what you want to be doing about 8 weeks away from having a baby?! I’m not much use to hubby and the dust makes me sneezy, so he’s been doing a fantastic job mostly on his own. I’ve been hiding upstairs thinking I’m sewing, but mostly touching my fabric (yep, I do that too). The frames are starting to go up and it’s starting to come together. We are also hoping to re-use a lot of the cabinetry from the old one to make the shelves in the new pantry. Nothing like a bit of recycling!

We decided to group it into sections, so that the work doesn’t all need to be done now. Hubby’s going to concentrate on the pantry and we’ll leave the fridge side until later (hopefully not 5 years later, but probably a couple). Now that it’s a real renovation, it does mean that the new pantry will be bigger…which is exciting. It’s hard to tell from the pictures, but the section on the left of the heating duct is new. The old pantry finished where the hole in the floor is. The fridge will move over to the left to make room.

Roman has been enjoying it all and helping out. He had lots of fun measuring the fridge for us, even calling out random numbers and was surprisingly good at using a screwdriver. That’s his new fake ‘camera’ smile…awww!