Necessity is the Mother of Invention

After my husband (then boyfriend) and his son moved in with me, I realized we were sorely lacking in cabinets. They worked fine when it was just me and my cats, but another adult and numerous jars of babyfood later I needed something more. Since I had just gotten a bunch of tools I decided it was time to do something simple. I needed someplace to store extra boxes of soda and all the jars of baby food. So we figured why not have me build a simple bookshelf type thing to hold the extra cans of food. Like a makeshift pantry.

I bought a couple pieces of whitewood (the cheap stock from the big box stores). I measured the space next to the fridge and it was only about 8.5 inches deep, but 3-4 feet wide. Basically this would go on the side of the fridge. I still hadn't learned how to make my circular saw work all that well, but I had my table saw now that I could cut the pieces to length. I started out making a basic square. I laid it all out on my back patio trying to look like I knew what I was doing. I didn't, but how hard can it be to make a square right?

Turns out it CAN be hard, but I chose to ignore how hard it was. I was doing just plain old butt joints and screws. I was not trying to even countersink the screws or dado in the shelves. Just slap them against eachother and screw them together. I don't think I even used glue, eek. In the end I had a square box and I added a few shelves in the middle. I did make every attempt to attach the shelves at 90 degree anges so they would be level when I stood this up. Once I had it standing, it was....close. But Robert agreed that it was close enough that we could easily use it. Nothing was going to fall out and if anything it slanted slightly to the back so the jars would have slipped farther into the back of the unit.

I bought some 1/4 inch pine for the back of the unit. It gave it stability and looked nice when you looked in there. Some minor trouble with cutting the pieces perfectly square so when laid next to eachother there was no gap. But again we decided that the few tiny wholes would be obscured by jars of food. This was a servicable unit and not some fancy piece afterall.

With that done I set it in place. It looked okay, but looked.....unfinished somehow. I decided to cover the front of each of the shelves and the sides with 1x2 pieces of wood. I put the flat grain part out so instead of looking at the side of each shelf/board, you were looking at the face of the 1x2's. Feeling fancy I added some top and bottom moulding to fancy it up and even mitered the corners. Now I had a fairly dressed up simple shelf system. Its amazing how much nicer just adding those 1x2's made it.

By then I just couldn't stop. I wanted to make it even nicer. Feeling more confidant with each thing I added I wanted to go bold. I wanted to put on doors. I wanted to be able to keep the little man out of there. He was only about 12-16 months old around then and into everything. Since this was going to be on the side of the fridge I wasn't going to be able to attach it to the wall or anything like that. Building doors with a single handle high up seemed a simple solution.

The width posed a problem. I didn't know a lot about hinges and I was buying most pieces of wood already the correct size since I wasn't great at cutting sizes yet. Naturally the width of the piece was not able to be evenly divided by 2 for 2 doors. After much debate, Robert gave me the solution. Why not add 2 pieces of wood the side so that you can have something to attach the doors to and have them be the right width. Perfect right? It was!

I added 2 pieces of 1x4 I think on each side and then was able to have 2 doors each 16 inches wide. I used my new router table to make the inside seam more decorative. Added a few hinges and it was done. Sure the doors might not be 100% perfectly straight, but they closed and opened perfectly. With a little stain and a few layers of poly we had a fancy new pantry. I was pretty shocked and how nice this came out for being my first project.

Unstained (yet filled to see if it would work. It really held a lot of stuff. We really loved that)

Stained to match our existing cabinets. The stain and poly really made it look schnazzy.

The final pantry. We didn't even need to put a lock on the handle because in the end they were too high for L-man to reach.