Pantry Plans

I've mentioned several times that we are having issues with our kitchen storage, specifically our spice collection. A large part of this is that we don't have a pantry to speak of, right now our "pantry" consists of block and board shelves in the basement. Don't get me wrong, I am very very grateful for the storage room the basement gives us, however I would love to have some of our kitchen stuff in a more accessible area. Well we have plans to fix (or at least alleviate) this problem, big plans!

One of the things I love about this house is the placement of the dining room, it's right next to the kitchen which makes entertaining easy because you can talk to guests that have gathered around the dining room table. We like thinking of the dining room as an extension of the kitchen and therefore it is the perfect place to add pantry space. We came up with the idea to build some corner shelves that will fit in to the corners of the dining room. They will be open shelves which means we can only put nice looking things on them but it will be a great use of otherwise wasted space. Eric has some grand plans for how he is going to make these shelves and I'm going to leave that to him, he's the engineer, not me. My part comes in the form of making the stuff that goes on the shelves look presentable. Here are some of my inspiration pictures of open pantries,

Today I took the first step and started buying some glass jars for spices. This will not only help with making things look nice but will also help consolidate some of our duplicate spices which in turn helps with the storage problem. Here are what the jars look like, I plan to pick up more as I can find them for cheap,

I have no idea when this project will be completed, it may not be for quite a while but I am excited to think about the day when we will have extra storage for our kitchen stuff :-)