OUR STORAGE STORY

Notice anything different in this picture?

You may notice that Noel looks like a dweeb, or the fact that Roxy looks like a total DIVA (please, Kirsten, not another picture), but neither of those things are out of the ordinary.  What is different is what is currently going on right behind Noel's head...the pantry!

If you follow me on instagram, you probably already know that about a week or two ago, we jumped in head first and decided the time had come to try our hand at building a pantry.  Two weeks later, we're still working on getting the last wall up.  But before we get into that, let's take a look at what we've accomplished thus far.

Day 1 minus 8 months: Mark out where the pantry will go.  I may or may not have done this last summer.  Nothing like a little blue tape on the floor for a solid 8 months to get you motivated.

Day 1: Buy materials.  We stopped by our local HD and bought a bunch of 2x4's to frame out this bad boy.  However, before we started building everything, Mr. Noel removed all of the trim in the area (see fabulous picture above), and then we double checked all of our measurements sans trim.  He also removed the drywall on the ceiling to make it easier to frame the walls/install new lighting. End day one.

When we bought "all" of the materials we needed to frame the wall on Friday, it turned out to be not nearly everything we needed.  So Saturday morning, we ran back to HD to buy a plumb bob so we could make sure the wall would be all perfect (sidenote: it isn't). 

Day 2:  Buy plumb bob, laugh at Noel when he asks how we're supposed to tell if the plumb bob is vertical (for those of you don't know, a plumb bob is like a little weight attached to a string, so when you hold it up to the ceiling, GRAVITY makes sure the line is perfectly straight, and then you can mark the spot on the floor directly below it).  This allowed to make sure the corners of the pantry lined up perfectly from the floor to the ceiling. 

After Noel came to his senses and understood the concept of gravity, we moved on to cutting the boards.  Yours truly worked the miter saw like a madman cutting all of our studs to the right length.  Then we laid them out on the floor before we screwed them all together. 

Once we screwed them all together, we started to fit them into place.  Only there was one itsy bitsy problem.  Someone (who shall remain nameless) told me to make the walls 9' tall, even though in some places, the ceiling was as much as a quarter inch lower.  So that someone then spent a solid 3-4 hours sanding our top plates to make the walls fit.  Moral of the story, don't listen to your husband when he tells you to ignore dimensions. :)

Day 3: After an extreme amount of sanding, our walls finally fit, so we installed two of the three walls.

Before we nailed down the wall with the door, we put the door in the rough opening to make sure everything fit.  We didn't actually install the door, we just set it in there.  Luckily, it fit.  Success!

Once the door is installed, I'm going to paint some part of it chalkboard (and then remove the chalkboard contact paper from the cabinet next to it).  What I can't decide is if I just want to paint the squares chalkboard, or just commit to it and paint the entire door.  Thoughts?

Day 4: Now this is where the hang up begins.  We have the third wall all cut and fit and all that good stuff.  See?

However, there's an outlet right behind the stud that needed to be moved.  And before we went to go and move it, we had to the honest thing and pull an electrical permit.  We knew we'd have to pull a permit regardless, since we'll be installing a new light fixture in the space where there previously wasn't one, but the permit process put the project on halt for a little while.  

In the mean time, I did manage to hang about half of the drywall on the outside of the pantry (which you can kind of see in the very first photo).  And that brings us to where we are today.  

I now have our electical permit, so either tonight or this weekend, we're going to dive in headfirst again, pretending we're electricians (turns out Noel's electrical engineering classes weren't a waste) and tackle the rest of this pantry. Cross your fingers and pray we don't blow up our house.  Or ourselves. :)