Pantry

My research landed me on a plan that included: exposed solid walnut shelving - with custom mounting brackets, ample counter space to house our toaster oven and espresso machine, a bar sink, and plenty of base cabinet space.

The original pantry space was quite barren, with no water supply, drainage or electricity (other than the ceiling light). Some of my first steps involved deriving a partially contrived plan to supply the space with electricity and water. The benefit of the pantry space is that it is located directly above our utility room, so I knew I would have options to provide electricity, water and drainage quite easily.

To wire up the space, I tapped into the back of an existing outlet that was in the dining room. It's on a circuit that is rarely used, so I wasn't concerned with overloading it. For water supply, I got really lucky. There were both hot and cold water supply lines going up the wall to the right of where the sink is now located. I found this out by accident when cutting down the base trim to facilitate a snug base cabinet fit. When levering out the trim, the pry bar broke through the drywall, and exposed the cold water pipe. Upon further research I discovered the second supply line! For drainage, I cut a hole in the floor into the utility room below and ran a two inch black pipe down through it. I tapped the supply line into an existing vent line for our ejection pit in the basement - not an ideal solution, but with the expected volume of water from the bar sink, I was willing give it a shot. It works like a charm!

For the exposed shelves, only one of them landed on a vertical stud, so I had to get creative with respect to supporting the supports. I ended up cutting channels in the sheet rock, so I could feed up 2x4's that were sandwiched to the drywall. Prior to deriving this solution I did experiment with other anchoring options, but none of them made me feel comfortable with respect to their load baring capacity.

The corner cabinet proved to be quite the challenge too. I didn't want have a big void of unusable space space in the back part of the cabinet, so I spent days (really over a month with time away from the project) thinking of solutions. It took at least three different attempts before I figured out a design that would work. You can see the successful and failed attempts in the photo album.

I'm truly trilled with respect to how this project turned out. I consider it the nicest room in the house - or it's at least the most expensive room in the house per square foot (labor + materials).

Project Photo Album

Here is the source Google Photo Album for this project.

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