Christy unveiled the final results of our kitchen remodel, but I thought I’d go back through the project and review some of the things we did for the first time in our lives. No better place to start than where we did – our fabulous double pantry.
I’m famous for four words in our house – I’M NOT A CARPENTER. That’s my excuse for every 1/16″ short cut or not so straight cut. But hey, that’s why God made filler and shims, right?
As bad as I am at carpentry, I have to admit I had some fun on this project. I usually lose my temper when doing home improvement projects because I’m a little out of my depth, being a wire guy, but I took my time to try and get things right. In the end it all came out great. Blaring ZZ Top and Van Halen the entire time really helped keep my nerves calm too.
I was going to rent a nail gun to build the framing, but after talking to the guys at Home Depot I decided to buy #9 X 2-1/2″ construction screws. Per my famous words above, I didn’t want to get something nailed in place, be out of square, and end up cracking the wood taking it back apart.
It wasn’t that I was out of square / level, but I did have to move a couple boards around since I don’t build walls and doorways every day, so I’m glad I went with screws.
When building the framing for the double pantry, one of the most important parts was making sure the side was was going to be even with the existing hall doorway so that the shiplap didn’t bow at all.
I remeasured and fretted over it a little because I wanted it to be perfect, but really all I did was butt the wood up against a scrap piece of 3/8″ drywall that I ripped off by the sink that needed to be repaired from taking off the old backsplash tile.
One thing I did have to move was the base for the center dividing wall between the double pantry. At first I just went with the center line. Makes sense, right?
What I found was, with the front end framing on both ends, the doors would not be center in the wall if I made the center interior wall centered. If I did, it would have came into one of the door frames. It was a little disappointing because that made the main pantry (right) a little smaller than the other, but it was only a couple of inches, so it wasn’t a huge deal.
The supports for this wall weren’t really important since none of it is supporting the structure, but I still needed studs between the ceiling header and door header so that I had something to attach the drywall and shiplap to.
I’ve done drywall before, but one thing I learned on this project was how to actually cut drywall. No one ever showed me how to do it before. I just did it.
Somewhere during the project I saw a video of someone cutting drywall. Sadly it was after I did all of this. I always ran the razor knife down it over and over and over again until I was pretty much all the way through.
Turns out all you have to do is score it, crack it back, and score the other side. It’s really easy and makes a lot less mess than my method. Thank you internet.
So, as we were beginning this project, Christy decided that she wanted to cover every inch of wall with faux shiplap (F you internet). I wasn’t looking forward to that AT ALL, but I have to say, it turned out great and I’m glad we went to the effort.
Sticking with the double pantry and rolling that into the shiplap, I did run into an issue. The pantry doors took up so much space in the wall, to center them in the wall meant it would cut into the far right inner wall space. The result would have been that the inside wall of the main pantry would come out past the door frame. Gross.
So, I had to do some re engineering. I had to take the drywall off (below is a video with a handy tip on how to remove and reuse) and put the shiplap straight to the studs. I reused the drywall to patch areas that were damaged when removing the backsplash.
So how do you attach faux shiplap to a stud? Won’t you have an open gap between each board? Well, I’m glad you asked.
To correct the issues of having gaps open to the wall cavity, I took scrap pieces of underlayment, clamped them to the piece above, nailed them to that piece, and continued layering down the wall.
After all was said and done, we ended up with all this extra storage. Many things I will get to were game changers, but this may have been the biggest one. No more digging around for cans in a 24″ deep cabinet! No more moving everything to to the table to see what we even had! Everything is right up front and easily accessible.
In the next kitchen post, I’ll detail what it took to do the faux shiplap. It was quite a chore, but well worth it.