Things I Love Thursday: Cute Dry Erase Boards!

I was doing errands at Target the other day when I saw these cute dry erase boards in the $1 bins.

I love that they look like paper! They’re supposed to be for kids to practice their handwriting, but I think they’ll be so cute for lists all over the house! For $1 each. You can’t beat that.

For grocery lists:

For to-do lists:

I really bought quite a few ;) and I will be putting them in various places all over the house. :)

And then, I was so inspired by cute dry erase boards to keep things organized, that I took the photo dividers that always come in photo storage boxes, laminated them, and put them in my pantry to label what’s supposed to be behind each door.

No excuses for not putting things away in their proper places :)

An organized pantry makes for a happy lady.

Kind of cute, right?

So, go to Target and get some cute paper-like dry erase boards!

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? :)

Pantry Progression

No, I haven’t gotten any more work done on the pantry, since I spent the weekend painting Grandma’s cabinets.

Here’s where I left off:

While I continue to create new swear words as I attempt to install the remainder of the pantry doors, I thought I’d show you how we built the pantry.

When Brandon’s old job was moving buildings, they were cleaning out their shop and offered him lots of free lumber/plywood, etc. It was all scraps to them, but it was free gold to us! Most of the plywood was CDX (i.e. not finish grade) but I decided not to care, because it was all a full 3/4” thick – so it had great strength, most of it wouldn’t show, and I could mud/sand/paint the rest.

Then we had to decide what kind of doors or closure would go on the pantry. I shopped around at Home Depot, Lowe's, and Menards where cabinet doors are $20+, so I also considered making my own doors, researching what materials I could use, what trim treatments would be easy but look good…

That’s when I got “Weekly Deals” email from Bailey’s Discount Center in North Judson, saying that they had a semi-load of cabinet doors for $.99 each!! Heaven! $.99 for doors to go on a pantry made of free wood seemed perfect.

I measured the dimensions of the wall that the pantry’d go on, Brandon hooked up the trailer, and we headed out to Bailey’s.

There were plenty of styles, but I chose these beautiful doors:

I did some quick cabinet designing at the Dairy Queen inside Bailey’s, decided I’d need about 24 doors, and then bought 30 to be safe.

Grandpa and I decided to create 4 independent pantry units that we could build in the garage and then install on the wall. (One of the units is deeper than the rest to accommodate serving dishes and extra appliances, etc.)

First, I painted the back of the wall to match the inside of the pantry, so it’d look all built-in, then we began installing the units.

Each of the units is glued and screwed together, with a top and bottom, and 2 fixed shelves that correspond with the dimensions of the doors.

Grandpa and I created a base out of 2x6s that would serve as the toekick. We screwed the base into the studs of the wall, then screwed each pantry unit into it. We used L-brackets to secure each pantry unit to the wall, and also screwed each unit to each other.

Once we had all 4 units in, I put a 1.5” facing strip of plywood on the 2 interior shelves to give us more room for the doors to hit (and to match the 1.5” that was the width of each upright (since they were 3/4” each x 2)), and began mudding and caulking the seams.

I also caulked and mudded any huge gaps that showed, since we knew our walls weren’t straight/level/plumb at all.

Then, I painted everything to look seamless, added adjustable interior shelves (with pegs), filled them up, and lived with the pantry looking like this for over a year.

Oh! I forgot to mention one of my biggest design flaws. So, instead of making the pantry 12” deep like regular cabinets, I thought that saving 1-whole-inch would really make my kitchen seem bigger, so Grandpa and I built each unit to be 11” deep. All that happened was a lot of things wouldn’t fit easily into the pantry and were sticking out about an inch. Womp-womp.

Before putting the doors on, therefore, I decided to extend out my pantry by at least an inch. I ended up using 1x2s, which are really 3/4” x 1.5” to do it. It was a lot of tedious work that I should have avoided by making 12” cabinets like a normal person.

I glued and nailed (thank you, pneumatic nailer) the pieces on.

Then I primed and painted those, which brings me where we are today:

Woohoo! I know you loved that walk-through of pantry building.  If you’ve got any more questions about the building process or my gillions of mistakes, please feel free to ask! I’ll keep you updated as I add the rest of the doors, and finally trim out the top.

The First of the Pantry Doors!

When I am less excited, I will put together a post about how I designed and built this wall of a pantry.

Today, as we put up the first of the cabinet doors, I realize that I am not a cabinet designer. :) Lots of little errors are adding up to make for a bit of a headache. :)

But it’s working, and the first of the doors are up!

I’ve still got some painting/touching up to do and some refiguring of things, but I’m so happy that these first doors are up, so that now, we have an idea of what we’ll really be in for to get the rest of them up!

What about you? Do all of your projects turn out to be more complicated than you expect, like mine do? :)

 

(Oh! And speaking of more complicated projects…here’s a sneak peek of a humongous bunting project I’m working on for one of my best friends, Janis, who just had her first baby on Saturday!! It’s going to be the whole alphabet, with animals!! I’ve been working on it since her shower in March, though! Oops! It’s coming, Janis, I swear! :)

(And Janis, if you’re reading this, I’ve got a little personalized something for baby Lincoln’s nursery in the works, too!) :)

Pantry Progress!

Oh man am I excited!  It’s not a lot of progress, but after months and months of zero progress, anything is exciting to me!

Remember this pantry?

It’s been that way for over a year now.

I was lucky enough to get these unfinished cabinet doors at Bailey’s Discount Outlet for $.99 each.

$.99 each!

I bought 30 of them, and actually designed the pantry (sizes and whatnot) to fit the doors. The pantry will end up using 24 of them.

24 is a lot of doors.

I primed them with a brush and Zinsser’s FastPrime2. It took forever. And a lot of space in the garage. Then I began to paint them. One thin coat on about 12 of the doors. And it took forever. And I didn’t love the paint (regular wall latex). And I gave up. So they’ve been piled up in the garage since then.

Till today!

Grandpa and Grandma want to paint their kitchen cabinets as a great, inexpensive refresher. I’m going to help! (I’ll take pictures and post all about it!)  So in the meantime, I thought I’d re-start my own doors as guinea pigs before we start on their kitchen.

I bought a gallon of Benjamin Moore’s Advance in Simply White (to blend with our existing Ikea cabinets). 

            

(I was almost talked into using Benjamin Moore’s oil-based Satin Impervo. You know I love oil based paint. But I decided against it for fear that it’d yellow sooner than later, and although I would love the hard, tough finish, I really don’t want to do this project again.)

Grandpa’s got a trusty Wagner WideShot Airless Paint Sprayer that’s sprayed our basement ceilings (the open joists and pipes and all) and cinder block walls, his deck, a friend’s basement ceilings and walls, and a set of Ikea shelves that I have. It sprays the paint on thick and it always works.

I started by cleaning off the doors (since they’d been stored in the garage for so long) and sanding the grain that had been raised by the primer (with 220 grit sandpaper). I used the air compressor and a blow gun to spray off all the dust.

I didn’t thin the paint, filled up the sprayer, and went to town. I set up some horses outside (where I wouldn’t have to protect the ground – lazy!) and began on the back sides of the doors. I wasn’t sure if it’d spray on too thick and textured-y, but I thought I’d give it a shot. The doors were just $.99.

I adjusted the flow knob a little – decreasing it for a slightly finer spray. But it turned out that the nice thick coat is just what the doctor ordered. I kept the finer spray (which is still thicker than something like an HVLP gun would produce, I think) but went over each side in 3-4 directions to ensure nice, even coverage in all the grooves/corners. It’s so hot out that the Advance is probably drying a little faster than it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t seem to be adversely affecting anything.  The nice thick (but not too thick!) finish is drying perfectly smooth and making for one-coat coverage! That’s something I can never complain about!

Here’s some of my 24 doors:

I couldn’t be happier! They look amazing! And I painted one side of all 24 doors, including some sanding and cleaning, in about 2 hours. That’s waaaaay better than how long it was taking me to do by brush…that was so bad that I gave up! :)

Isn’t it looking great? In person the finish is so smooth and beautiful!

To sum up: unthinned Benjamin Moore Advance sprayed great in an airless Wagner Wide Shot Power Painter!

I’ll keep you posted when I do the other sides, and along the way to speak to the paint’s longevity.  This also means that I have to get moving on the pantry itself…there’s a little more to do before I can install the doors. And attach all those hinges…ugh!

Anyway, for now I’m excited! Woohoo!