Butler's Pantry - Renovation (part 1)

Over a year since my last post! It's not that we haven't been working on the house since then, but everything's been very minor improvements like fixing the way a door swings on its hinge - nothing that I felt really lent itself to blogging and pictures. I have something now, though!

Our current project is remodeling the "butler's pantry". (No, we don't have a butler.) According to Wikipedia:

A butler's pantry or serving pantry is a utility room in a large house, primarily used to store serving items, rather than food. Traditionally, a butler's pantry was used for storage, cleaning and counting of silver; European butlers often slept in the pantry, as their job was to keep the silver under lock and key. The wine log and merchant's account books may also have been kept in there. The room would be used by the butler and other domestic staff; it is often called a butler's pantry even in households where there is no butler.

BEFORE

Below you can see a snapshot of the butler's pantry prior to demolition. It included a homemade cupboard and shelves on the back (east) wall, plus a small cupboard hanging from the northwest corner. On the ceiling was a small pull-string light. Unfortunately, it wasn't serviceable for storing much more than cookbooks. The lower shelves were too narrow to store large items, and the upper shelves too narrow and too short.

BEFORE

DEMOLITION

Here are some views of the pantry with the cupboards removed:

Northeast corner

Southeast corner

West wall (doorway)

INSPIRATION

To update the pantry, we were heavily inspired by some images we found on Pinterest. (You can see my Remodeling and Home board by clicking here.) The biggest inspiration, however, was Jordan's pantry renovation on Oh Happy Day. Although her ceiling looks higher, and the walls possibly a bit narrower, the layout is a very reasonable match compared to ours. It even uses white subway tile like what we have in our upstairs and downstairs bathrooms.

Inspiration photo from Oh Happy Day

TILING

The first step was tiling, which we have plenty of experience with thanks to the previous bathroom renovations. I won't walk you step through step with those, but here are a few photos to show what we did. When I had to cut pieces for the corners (and for the floor and ceiling, since the walls weren't square), I labeled both the wall and the back of the tile with the same code (a compass direction indicating the wall, and the tile number). As you can see, the short northwest corner between the doorway and window was really a pain!

SHELVES

With the purchase of some metal IKEA shelf brackets, some wooden planks (48" x 11" for the back wall), some screws, a 3/16 ceramic tile/glass drill bit, a 6" drill bit extension (for getting the screws in at the corners), and some paint, we were ready to begin.

Because I'm working on the shelves by myself, I screwed the brackets to the shelves, then stacked boxes and books to bring the shelves up to the desired height and keep them there while I used a pencil to mark the locations to drill. Fortunately(?), I have quite a few printer-damaged copies (too much binding glue) of Corporia, my latest book, so I used those to boost up the shelves in small increments until I had them at the right height. The bottom shelf is 21" off the ground, with the next two shelves at roughly 15" above that one. The last two are 14" above the previous shelf, with the shelf space getting just a bit smaller as we get closer towards the ceiling.

I had to hold the drill steady to get a hole started in the tile, then continue to drill slowly so as to avoid cracking it. This made it slow going, since it's not like drilling into wood - and the absolute last thing I want to do is have to chisel out and replace a broken tile!

This paint goes on pink and turns white as it dries

Metal shelf brackets (we rotated these so the long side supports the shelf)

So far I only have the back (east) wall done, but hope to start on the adjacent (north) wall tonight. We'll see how it goes. Free time is precious right now, so progress is incredibly slow, but I hope to have it all done by Christmas! I'll keep you posted.