The first fully finished space in our new home!

As you might know, my partner and I have been renovating our new home for quite a while now and we’ve actually been living in it for a year now (the moving-in anniversary was a few days ago). Since we are doing most of it by ourselves on a limited budget and we are still waiting to sort out all the official paperwork so that we can get the old roof replaced and build a separate entrance, the progress has been relatively slow – or relatively fast, considering the amount of work and that we both have full-time jobs and other stuff in our lives as well.

Either way, most of the flat is now fully functional (kitchen, bathroom etc.) and close to finished, but most of the rooms are still missing some final details. At the moment, the bathroom is missing a corner cabinet and some decorative slats, the kitchen is very close to getting its custom epoxy beer coasters tiles and some other bits, while the living room, which will stay very similar to how it was before, still needs a fresh coat of paint and a refurbished sofa. You get the idea.

I’ve made a separate page for all the home renovation posts here and I can now show you the first fully finished space in our new home: the pantry. It might not be the most exciting room in the flat, but it is 100% done and it is already super useful! 🙂

Our little pantry is located off the side of the living room and it is crazy just how many things we are now able to store inside this small space. It had always been used a pantry so we didn’t really need to do a lot with it, but there was some old water damage as well as some stains from the old chimney shaft on the walls and once we started fixing it up, we kept finding stuff to improve.

BEFORE

I think it took me about 5 coats of limewash paint to cover up the stains – we are using traditional limewash paint everywhere, because the house is part of the historical old town and dates back to the 1600s, so the walls are made of very random materials and need to “breathe”. Then we decided to paint over the metal parts of the ventilation shaft and the chimney access door, which we boarded up and glued shut as the wood burner downstairs is not ours and the chimney will never need to be maintained through this access door + we wanted to minimise the smoked smell when it is in use. I also smoothed out the raw concrete ceiling with fine plaster and painted it white as well and my boyfriend laid the new floor tiles.

DURING

The pantry was the only space where we really cut some corners to make our work easier, so we laid the new floor tiles on top of the old ones and we didn’t bother straightening out the crooked walls. Since the house is old, pretty much none of our walls are straight (unless we chose to put a lot of effort into making them so), which makes for some interesting improvisations when it comes to furniture. That is why we chose simple metal shelf supports that we could flex a bit and adjust and underlay as needed to fit the wall curves. Similarly, each pantry shelf had to be adjusted to the wall and my partner custom-made them out of fir wood in the family workshop downstairs (which is also the reason why we have been able to do so much of this renovation ourselves, but I’ve already discussed that here). Then we oiled up the wooden shelves, added a fancy light fixture scavenged from various parts that were lying around at the house and had to be painted a uniform black, changed the old electric outlet and light switch, hung up the canvas pocket organiser we’d bought online et voilà, we have a pantry!

AFTER

Of course things couldn’t go smoothly for any part of our home renovation, so when it rains a lot and it is very windy, the water leaks out from the ventilation shaft. The outside air outlet is not protected well by the old roof and when the wind blows at just the right angle, the rain blows in and overflows into the pantry, so I’ll have to repaint that part of the wall when we get a new roof and fix this issue. But luckily that only happens twice per year during a big storm, so I am choosing to focus on the positive side, which is that we have a sexy new fully finished pantry. How do you like it?