Since we couldn’t start with the corner cab we decided to start with the pantry. If you remember from our earlier rendering post our pantry was going to look something like this:

The bad news, we weren’t sure if all 3 would fit. We were off by about a quarter of an inch. So we pulled the fridge out to get to work and noticed that there was some half inch base moulding to it’s left (where nobody can see anyway). Score! Great news. I removed it and we had our quarter inch and some!

Realizing that I would be mounting these cabinets directly to the wall and that my odds of hitting a stud every time were slim to none, I grabbed a scrap 1×6 that we had leftover from this project. It was the perfect size. So I screwed it into the studs to create a bridge between them giving me a solid wood beam to mount the top of all of the pantries into.

Then, since I had everything ready to go with the lumber box  I screwed everything in place, made sure it was level, lifted the cabinets (with Katie’s help of course) into place, and began to gang them together (aka connect them).

Beware of the Chestnut photobombs that ensue…

Unfortunately during this process there was a slight shift of the first cabinet despite clamping them together and we lost about a quarter inch of level.

After a full day of frustration and wracking my brain I finally figured out the issue. I had a shim (which I thought was helping) under the lumber box on the left side of the first cabinet and it was throwing everything off. So a couple screws and a quick removal and everything was good to go.

Once everything was flush, set, ganged, and ready, we started installing the pull-out shelves (which by the way are freaking awesome).

We put the sliding shelves in pantry 1 & 2 and installed static shelves in pantry 3.