What we wanted - What we Got (Kitchen Pantry)

#23 must have been a consideration in the moments before I made the decision to just go ahead and purchase (some of the best shrimp I ever had) lunch from a beach vendor. I was starving. And as such, #23 surfaced. I'm pretty certain I can take credit for this one.

Essentially, we wanted a pantry in our kitchen. It wasn't that we didn't have enough storage at our old place. Okay, really it was. We just didn't really realize that we only had two cabinets (upper at that) for food storage because we ate out so dang much. In crunching the numbers for the next place, we had committed to cooking a lot more from home. Hence why I won with the refrigerator wars and made sure that our pantry was our first improvement project.

Now. We moved into a new home. No one has ever lived here, it was built in 2006, there were not a whole bunch of projects to do here beyond the personalization we wanted to do for our selves.

What we love about our builder is that there is a lot of attention to detail. There are higher end finishes. It is easy to just move on in. With our pantry, there was an awesome pantry door already in place and there were great wood shelves in place too. Only "problem" with our place is that it is semi-custom. Moreso in places like the bathrooms and the kitchens. To the extent that 6 times out of 10, you can go to Home Depot and pick up a matching something. Those other 4 times, you drive "all the way into town" and come back bitter and angry about what you couldn't find and will have to create yourself. So was the case with our pantry shelves.

We spent a lot of time drilling little holes and recreating shelves so that we could reclaim the middle corner that was just not working out with the current shelves. All so that we could stuff it full like this:

Which is actually not a great picture because you can't see the third set of shelves (to the left of the door). All to say, I used to work retail, in a grocery store. So you can see that I totally stocked and faced my shelves like any good retailer would do. You might also notice that in that middle shelf (the small one to the left visible in the photo), the third shelf from the top, that is the designated Graham Cracker shelf.

Yeah. I know.