Hi everyone! If you remember back to last year, Mother’s Day was our first gathering in the house since we officially moved in and I took my mom’s request for fried chicken seriously. I made 3 versions for the different eaters in our family, vegetarian (soy milk buttermilk tofu), GF/DF chicken and classic. It was absolutely delicious and so successful that I went even bigger in the fall when we finally had a housewarming party and I made some exorbitant amount of fried chicken nuggets (I think it was something like 10lbs but I kind of blacked out after 4 hours of frying). Anyway, I digress…this year, we did Mother’s Day again at our house but I cut the versions down to 2 since I was so impressed with the flavor of the GF/DF version that I made for the housewarming party (no one had any idea and there were no leftovers!). Last year’s house project to be done in a rush for the family gathering was reupholstering our dining chairs (4 seats only and 2 seats that I STILL have yet to do the backs of…only mildly embarrassing 😳). This year’s project was getting the pantry finished and boy did we cut it close!
The hubby had done such an amazing job with the base cabinet, I’m so proud of his ingenuity and willingness to just go for it and figure it out. See, the space was such a weird size that there just weren’t any pre-made bases that we could use so the options were (a) give up on utilizing this space as a beautiful pantry that could (in theory) have open doors all the time or (b) build it ourselves…I think you all know us well enough to know that (a) was simply not an option. (Or is it just that I won’t accept “we can’t do that” as an answer…we’ll deal with that one another time).
I gave you all a preview of the piece before the doors went on in my last post and I can tell you, you’ll be blown away by what it looks like now. The shaker doors were custom built by the hubby, the “U” shaped shelves I insisted on were designed and custom built by the hubby, and it’s all painted. (Can you tell I’m excited??) The pre-family gathering mad rush was painting (pretty sure we finished 30 mins before our first guests arrived) but sometimes you just need an event to light a fire under your a$$ to get things done! I know that’s one of my favorite ways of finding the motivation to finish a project (is public shaming/shame from your friends and family a bad motivator? More things to dig into at a later date).
Anyway, without further rambling…I give you, THE PANTRY!
This one was while we were debating how the shelves should be designed. This lasted a little while as the husband kept trying to explain to me how they should work and I kept explaining how I’m short and we needed to take into consideration how high I can reach 😂. 
I for one am really happy with how the final product came out and although there is more painting to do to make it perfect I’m not so ashamed of the ugly metal rack in the random hole in our kitchen now!
Until next time!
Pleasant To Pinewood 