Navigating Cabinet Challenges and Dealing with a Load-Bearing Wall

It’s already week two of redoing our laundry/pantry and we have… not a whole lot to show for it. If you remember from last week, we went hard on demo day and basically emptied the laundry room/pantry we’re transforming.

It’s going to eventually look open, spacious and functional, but right now it just looks, well, open, and we’re contending with holes in the floor and ceiling letting whoknowswhat in from outside the house.

But, this next week is when things will really start to take shape.

Week 1 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Reveal |

Cabinet shopping filled with shame

A few days ago we went cabinet shopping which basically turned us into that meme of Zach Galifianakis trying to do math. We’ve got a small space (made even smaller by our limited washer/dryer options in a pandemic and with weird dimensions) and the cabinet configurations weren’t really working in our favor.

We initially went to a building material outlet place but it was overwhelming. I love digging through outlet stores as much as the next person, but this place didn’t really have any prices on anything and when we asked the guy working how to figure out the cost of everything, he was really weird about it and handed us a sheet of paper with some codes and costs.

The cabinets were all mismatched and obviously we did the brisk walk outta there to go to our trusted Home Depot across the street.

We knew the big stores would at least have a dependable selection and we wouldn’t be stuck with one white shaker and an unfinished traditional door. We shamelessly configured our room in the aisles of the store, and then used the shame we lacked there to sheepishly ask the cashier if we could leave two of our three cabinets by the front desk while we did multiple loads in our SUV because we didn’t think about the car space we’d need to haul cabinets home.

Oh, and as we were walking out WITH A KITCHEN CABINET, we passed the guy who was working at the building material store across the street as he was walking into Home Depot! We didn’t address each other, thank God, but I’m sure he saw the shame in our eyes.

Ultimately, we went with one middle cabinet and two corner lazy Susan cabinets, then there’s about an 8-inch gap left over we’ll make into a shelf for cookbooks or baking pans like Yellow Brick Home did.

The load-bearing wall

So now we’ve at least got cabinets in place and the room is starting to look like a room again. If you remember the initial plan, we’ve got to move the fridge back into the pantry space and had half-demo’d that wall, but found out once we opened it up that it’s load-bearing. It’s got an obscene number of 2x4s holding that wall up, and we’re going to need an extra few steps to get that doorway the way we want it.

We messaged our old kitchen renovation contractor from Louisiana and asked about how difficult it would be to build a beam, and he seems to think we have the DIY skills to get it done. We’ve got a few calls out for quotes, though, because the entire structure of our house is a pretty intimidating DIY, so that element of our room makeover is still TBD.

This week’s plan

Make sure you’re following along on Instagram to check out our progress, but this week we’ll be adding our feature wall above the cabinets, preparing the open shelves and if we’re extra energetic, painting the cabinets. We got a sample of an amazing deep navy called Cavalry by Glidden that’s going to look perfect next to the brass cabinet hardware.

Our washer and dryer should be arriving next week so we can start focusing on that side of the room, but hopefully by then we’ll have a whole pantry wall in place.

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