My daughter’s new house had a great kitchen, but it didn’t really have a pantry. They did have space for a pantry behind their back door, but the space was non-standard and the pantries that we looked at didn’t fit well.

So I volunteered to build one.

I should note that while I’m pretty handy and I love building things, I’m not really a furniture guy. Most of my projects have just enough slop in them that I rely heavily on patching and painting – I don’t do many projects that showcase the natural wood.

As they had an immediate pantry need, I built and installed it in various stages.

For the first stage, I built two side by side cabinets with adjustable shelves and drawers. Initially, they wanted drawers that allowed you to see into them. It turned out like this:

I then built a third box to go on top.

And then I built a frame around it like this:

They finally decided that they wanted regular drawers, so I built and installed drawer covers. The hardest part was picking the hardware for the drawer pulls.

Finally, I built the cabinet doors and installed them. The result looked like this:

The entire project took way longer than I anticipated and I made a bunch of stupid errors along the way, but they are very happy with the result and their kitchen now has a ton of storage space.