The starting of new shelves for the Kitchen Pantry

We recently moved the Fridge from where it was when we bought the house. This left a wonderful area for a pantry.

A friend picked up a bunch of scrap wood from freecycle, and dropped it off in my garage knowing I am always looking for good junk. Part of my new found lumber loot, is a bunch of tongue and groove car siding. I decided to use this to make the pantry shelves.

I did up a plan in Sketchup and showed the wife as she sometimes doesn’t understand my vague handwavings and usage of generic terms.

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Everything so far is being cut on my table saw. It’s really a pain in the neck too, as my garage is so full of junk that I don’t have the proper space I need. I have other saws, a jigsaw, a circular saw, but I can’t cut a straight line with them like I can on the table saw. There’s a radial arm saw in a shed at my folks for me, I just gotta go up and get it.

I started with uprights so I have a good, strong support for my shelves. The shelves across the back will be 2 pieces deep, and I will have a 1 piece deep shelf on the left side eventually. That explains the funky wooden corner. I can run shelves both ways. I pinned the uprights to the walls with some finish nails, but those are just to keep everything from sliding around, the shelves wedged in is what will really hold everything together.

The start of the shelves in the pantry.

The shelves will have a raised nosing for added strength and so stuff doesn’t want to fall off. Not much of a nosing, maybe an eighth of an inch or so. I cut the outside of the uprights at a 45, so the nosing will be cut to match. It will be quite a pain in the butt to finish out the shelves, but I think it will be worth it in the end. The side shelves will also be cut with a tongue on the one end to interface with the back shelves. Not easy to describe, but when I get it done at some future date, a photo will clear up what I mean.

The shelf bracket is cut to match the 45 of the upright as it's taller then the shelf nosing will be.

The back of the back shelves will need to be cut on the left corner so they slide all the way back to the wall. Another pain to cut – probably will happen with both the table saw and a jig saw.

The roughed in shelf. It still needs to be cut in the back left and nosed.

I’ve got the back shelves up, and put a bunch of stuff on them just to get a feel for it. They are all going to come down and get re-hung at a different height once I figure out what exactly goes where. It’s a matter of re-arranging the rest of the kitchen around the holes we opened up and deciding what’s really going to go into the pantry. Items will be measured, remeasured, and then heights padded because somebody is going to make that ONE box that’s an inch taller than all the rest.

Stuff on my shelves! I doubt the kitchen appliances will stay  there.

All in all, I am quite pleased with the progress so far. I’ve scrapped a few big ideas I had, and am tweaking others to make the space work.

I am quite pleased with how well the car siding fits in with our cabinets.

I am trying to decide if I want to leave the pantry open or close it. If I closed it up, I would probably use a bi-fold door that opens to the left. I potentially have 5 cabinet doors that I can free up and use as the face of the bi-fold, but they are of 2 different sizes, so I don’t think that will work very well.

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