The Pantry Doors are Up!

Whew! Finally, all 24 pantry doors are up, hung, functional. It’s a big wall o’ doors and I love it.

We had a picnic over the weekend, and for us, getting the house ready usually means some construction. :) I’ll have a few quick projects to share over the next couple of posts, but for now, the big one! The pantry!

I showed you when we had gotten 2 doors hung. I described how we painted the doors and how we built the pantry.  Now I can tell you how we finished it off!

After we hung those first 2 doors and learned a lot, I hung a few more of the middle doors myself.

Then I remembered (because I had been trying to forget) that due to miscalculations, the bottom doors would hang down past the bottom of the pantry.

So I used some of my extra 1x2s to add some length to the bottom of the pantry frame. (Thank goodness we gave ourselves a big 2x6 toekick!)

It was very reminiscent of all the trim I had to add to the front of the pantry to make it deeper. :( At least it was a smaller project. And at least I had my amazing helper: a small Campbell Hausfeld 2-gallon air compressor and pneumatic nail gun.

This thing is great. It’s not really well regulated (compared to our larger, 6 gallon air compressor), so it can’t usually power much more than an 18 gauge or 16 gauge nail gun, and even then, sometimes you’ll have to wait for it to build up enough pressure to actually sink the nails. But it is small, and therefore always available to me and easy to bring around to my various projects. We got it at Lowe’s on a Black Friday a couple of years ago, and it’s been invaluable ever since. Same as the trim I added to the front of the pantry, I glued and nailed these bottom boards up. I caulked, primed, and painted them.

Then I called Grandpa. Putting up the middle doors wasn’t too bad on my own, but I knew that to put up so many more above and below, I would need help.

We formed a little assembly line for attaching hinges.

Grandpa drilled the holes (3 per hinge! 2 hinges per door!) and I attached the screws.

And we used this amazing self-centering drill bit (also called a hinge bit) for doing it! It was a life saver.

This unit has a tapered edge that fits right into the holes of the hinge, lining the drill bit up to be perfectly centered in the center of the hole. You press the spring-loaded contraption down and the drill bit goes into the wood! And because the bit does the lining up for you, the drilling process goes more quickly because you don’t have to eyeball each hole.

The drill bit especially came in handy when we were mounting the doors/hinges to the pantry frame. (I learned about this amazing drill bit from This Old House!)

And voila! We just repeated the process on the 18 remaining doors, put my 3/$1 handles on all of them (also from Bailey’s Discount Center), and we were done!

I’m still debating whether I want to just trim out the top, or somehow try to make it functional storage (we’ve stashed stuff up there already, so making it official storage could be great!), so I will keep you updated. But for now, one more quick before and after.

Have you completed any big projects recently? Isn’t that great big sigh of relief wonderful? :)