PANTRY MAKEOVER

Since I've been busy in the kitchen painting my cabinets I figured I would take a much needed break from the tedious painting job to tackle a smaller project--reorganizing my pantry:

While I was taking everything off the shelves I figured it was a good idea to paint and clean the area. I told myself that this would be an easy task only taking approx 2-3 hours-No biggie. (Can you sense the foreshadowing I am setting up for you by saying these simple words: "no biggie", "easy task", "smaller project"? Well, there it is.)

After taking the shelves out of the pantry I cleaned them well (with the help of my daughter!) and we painted a base coat of white paint that I already had.

And boy did those walls need that paint:

ICK.

Then I had the brilliant idea to do a harlequin diamond pattern on the wall. Easy-peasy, right? Wrong.

This is where it gets bad. I attribute this to my personality-high creativity levels, low execution rates.

I was thinking something like this:

I googled  various ways to accomplish this task and came up with the idea to mark with a pencil all the mid points of each diamond (I decided I wanted my diamonds 6x9 inches after drawing various diamond sizes on paper and holding them up to the wall for depth perception). So, I started marking all the points and figured it'd be a breeze to take a ruler and connect them all. Like this:

This didn't work out so well. Whether from my own impatience or lack of attention to detail, not all of the points would line up correctly. PITA. So, I erased and started over (this was what was so disheartening-erasing so many times). I tried this technique probably 2 times before calling it quits for the night.

The next day, I google some more and found a website that said to make squares/rectangles and put a diamond in the very middle. Basically, my technique from before but one additional step would help make everything uniform. To make it easier (by now I was close to giving up) I went out and bought an $8.00 chalk line to make straight lines.

This was more of a PITA because I couldn't make a long vertical line straight enough (with the help of my husband and daughter). Most of the issues here were that we were working in such a small space that 2 people couldn't fit in the pantry in order to hold the line and snap. Bothersome.

After chalking it looked something like this (the blue lines, but all the way down the wall):

I added the red diamonds to show you that I should have had no problem adding in diamonds to individual squares. But they didn't end up lining up correctly (I swore to Luhvah, more than once, that our pantry walls were lopsided). Then I had the epiphany to use an actual diamond cut-out to trace. So I made a template from some poster board I had lying around in the exact size I needed. But I don't think I measured all that accurately and my diamonds kepts getting off center from my squares. What a headache. I ended up making 3 separate templates before I got the size exactly what I needed it to be (6x9, not 5 5/6 x 8 3/4, etc, etc)

I erased diamonds from half the wall probably 2-3 times again. By this time I was almost in tears because I just don't do well with such a required attention to detail and I realized I must be messing something up (I'm too impatient to be precise). I was at the point that I wanted to paint over all the pencil markings and eraser boo-boos with white paint and just forget about a pretty pattern on the wall. But these pics kept floating in my head:

Via



VIA

This project started out Saturday morning and by this time it was late Sunday evening. So, I cried myself to sleep because according to Luhvah I'm dramatic like that and I told myself, "I'll think about that tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day!" I also had figured out part of my problem was that I needed my diamonds to be level so I taped a small level to my template:

Monday morning I woke bright and early and was determined to win this battle with the diamond pattern.

Long story so very, very long...I finished. And they were a little off but not much:

It's difficult to see but you can see both the diamonds and the blue chalk marks for the squares (which, in the end, were irrelevant - no help at all).

Enough of my blathering. You wanna see the end product? (of course you do!)

It's a little askew, and I knew it about half way through but this girl just did.not.care. It would've required erasing (AGAIN!) and there was not a chance in hell I was doing it again I opted not to stress about it. So, I have the leaning tower of diamonds in my pantry.

I'm still pleased as punch with it. In the end I didn't need perfection because, 1) I knew I was DIY for the first time and that required some trial/error to find what worked best for me 2) it was a small space so it wouldn't be a big deal 3) It was mostly gonna be hidden by piles of food so no one would notice.

I taped off every other diamond when I was done and I painted them. Then I waited an hour, taped off the remaining diamonds, and painted.

Some of the paint bled through the tape producing lines that weren't so sharp:

That was okay. I just did some light touch-ups with a small paint brush:

And then I ended up with this:

After adding everything back in and sorting my goods into baskets and such (oh, and since I'm cheap I used what I had around the house-they didn't match-if they had it might have made for a prettier picture. But I was going from cheap peeps. You know me!)

It was a tedious job and I almost gave up more than once but I am pleased with how it turned out. And maybe if I'm ever feeling extra frivolous I will go to the Dollar Tree and buy about 10 baskets that all match. But for now I just feel like my pantry is more organized and I have tons more space. Plus, the pretty wall doesn't hurt to look at either.

Total cost for this makeover- $8.00 for the chalk line I purchased. (which didn't even help! HA!) But that's an ok investment because I will be painting stripes in my bathroom in the future so I would have had to purchase it anyway.

P.S. All the cruddy pictures are from my iphone. That's why they're so fuzzy.