PLeighing House: Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: The Pantry

There are a few things on the first floor we wanted to change. The first two are to remove the pantry in favor of floor-to-ceiling cabinets; and to widen the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room.

Pantry:

Here’s the kitchen on the day we bought the house:

The pantry closet (visible on the left) was 24” deep. My friends with similar pantries have complained that they are too deep and things get lost. Also, the bifold door blocks the doorway between the kitchen and dining room when open, and there was just a lot of wasted space inside. My current pantry is shallow but wide, and I like how easy it is to find everything. So, I wanted to remove the pantry and replace it with floor-to-ceiling cabinets. Another friend did something similar with Ikea cabinets, and I wanted to steal her idea.

To do that, I had to know whether it was okay to remove the walls. I talked to a very nice inspector who agreed to look at photos of the studs without drywall. So, I popped a long red saw blade into my brand-spanking new DeWalt cordless reciprocating saw. The first time I fired it up it bounced all over the wall. Not good. But in time I figured it out and used my awesome Franklin Sensor stud finder to make sure I didn’t hit anything important.

And then I found this:

Not good. I knew the pipe was HVAC, but didn’t know what it was for. This was going to ruin my plans if I couldn’t move it. I cut out sections of drywall from the back of the pantry, hoping to find a place to divert the pipe. In the meantime, the inspector confirmed that I was okay to remove the pantry walls. Two weeks later, the electricians removed most of the kitchen ceiling in order to install new wiring for lighting, and I discovered that the pipe led to…our master bedroom closet. Yeah. We can live without that. Buh-bye pipe. The electricians pulled it out for me and now we just need to cap off the pipe under the floor.

Now I can have my wall of floor-to-ceiling cabinets! I finished removing the rest of the studs and drywall, which enabled me to:

Widen the kitchen/dining room doorway

I don’t like drywalled openings between rooms. We had one between our kitchen and dining room in our current house, and I hated it. Kids were always bumping into it and knocking paint off the corners. I like trim. White trim. But I needed more room to create a cased opening. Also, the doorway felt too narrow for as much traffic as it will see (we will eat in the dining room every night).

Since the new floor-to-ceiling cabinets will be only 15-inches deep, I was able to capture another four inches or so of space on the left-hand side of the opening, which I shored up with a few 2x4s. That little bit of light you see peaking out of the left hand side above the door is the amount of space I gained.

Here it is with the new drywall hung: