Turning a coat closet into a pantry

We have a coat closet in our kitchen. I don't know how that happened. It's kind of strange. Joseph and I have been meaning to turn it into a pantry...how hard could it be to add some shelves?

Right? Right??

Oh yeah, because all of our projects are that simple.

Here's the before shot. We took out the rod. Because honestly, who needs a coat closet in Phoenix anyway? We took our measurements and decided how we were going to space the shelves (taking into consideration what was going to be placed on them) and the length of wood needed.
Wood filler. Because this was going to be a professional project done by my Dad's standards.

We went to Lowe's and got one MDF board ($29) and three boards of furring strip for the supports ($2.18 each) and had Lowe's cut it down. Even though they claim not to do "exact cuts," they have always hit the mark when I've had wood cut there. The wood fit perfectly.

Aaaand here's our first problem. I don't know why I just assumed I would have the correct amount of studs in the wall to be able to screw into. Nope. I had one stud on one wall. So I had to go back to Lowe's and buy some anchors. Luckily, the people at Lowe's know their stuff, and the guy got me the kind that can hold up to 100 pounds. I love my people at Lowe's. But how do you make sure you are screwing into your anchor when you can't see it (because your piece of wood is covering it up)?

Joseph and I came up with a system. He would level the board, and then working as a team, we would drill three pilot holes into the wood, and draw a pencil mark showing where to line the wood up.

You can't really see it in this picture, but the middle hole is just a hole because there's a stud there, and on either side of it there are two anchors.

Problem number two: when we got to the top shelf supports, we ran into studs. Even though the stud finder was not lighting up. It was puzzling. But good news, right, now we can just screw into a stud, yea! Except that it busted our screws. Again, really puzzling. We managed to fix that dilemma but using smaller screws. Luckily, we had some in our stash, so it was not another trip to Lowe's (as much as I like that place, I try not to go more than three times in one project). It was a good thing we own a dremmel, because we had to cut out the broken screws.

Problem number three was when our drill died. A couple hours later after a good charge, we finally got all the shelf supports up.

Joseph painted the interior and the shelves, and now the shelves needed to be worked so that the edge was rounded. We don't have a router, so I worked it over with the sander.

Joseph nailed the shelves into place, and I got out the caulking gun. It is my job to caulk, because Joseph doesn't like to get his hands dirty. This is probably the reason he's a computer nerd and not a car fanatic. (But a really handy, manly computer nerd.)

Here is the shelf pre-caulk.

Post-caulk. Once I filled over those screw heads with wood filler and we painted again, it really looked good. You're going to have to take my word for it.


Seriously, we're professionals. It only took the entire weekend.