These DIYers Transformed a Cookie-Cutter Pantry into a Custom Kitchen Design Feature
It’s rare, but there can be such a thing as too much storage in a home — or, at the very least, storage areas that aren’t optimized to their full potential. Designer and DIYer Yoori Koo’s (@handwerkstudioatx) kitchen, when she moved into her newly built home, had a double-door pantry and a coat closet.
Yoori and her fiancé, Dan, felt the coat closet was “a little out of place,” so they moved the pantry into the coat closet and decided to build a custom coffee bar where the double doors once were. “We really wanted to add some personality to a pretty much all-white kitchen,” Yoori says. It would be a coffee bar during the day and a cocktail bar by night.
The DIYers demoed the wall to make an arch.
“We had to demo and rip out the pantry first, open up the walls,” Yoori explains, and it was messy — and difficult. Creating an arch shape was a “first” for Yoori and Dan, and it took some trial and error — especially draping the drywall over an arched form.
“Anybody who has worked with drywall before knows how dusty it gets!” she says. “We had to tent off the entire area to apply mud, sand, reapply mud, sand again, and do that for a few rounds.”
During the construction phase, they wired electricity where they wanted new sconces to go. Speaking of electrical, during the demo phase, Yoori and Dan learned they’d have to relocate their doorbell and thermostat (previously on the other side of the wall) to do this project, but it ended up being easier than expected.
In came cabinets and quartz counters.
Once the couple had the silhouette they wanted, they added cabinets from The Home Depot and Yoori’s dream quartz countertops and backsplash. “I picked a particular slab that I wanted and fortunately the granite place was able to give me the exact slab — and the exact PART of the slab — with the beautiful marbling that I wanted to showcase,” she says.
On her blog, Yoori explains further: “The countertop came in, and we went to building out the cabinet and building matching floating shelves before the stone guys came back to measure for the backsplash, she says.
They actually made their own fronts to fit the big-box drawers they’d ordered — “we cut them to size in solid oak and gave them a warm light stain and a few layers of polyurethane to seal it,” Yoori describes. “The face frame got a good amount of veneer to cover up the [pre-made] white.” They also added new baseboard in the area and covered it in the same wood veneer to match.
There’s power in the details.
Because Yoori loved the beautiful black stone so much, she didn’t want to disrupt it with any plugs or the pre-existing switch plates, so she splurged on minimalist black plugs from Prado. But she saved money by finding her brass sconces on Facebook Marketplace. The brass drawer pulls are from Pepe & Carol.
She and Dan finished the project by adding two oak floating shelves (attached to the wall using hidden brackets) and accessorizing. “I love everything about it!” Yoori says. “I love that it has become the new focal point of our kitchen!”
Yoori says it inspired her and Dan to make other upgrades to the kitchen, too, like painting their cabinets off-white and wrapping the island in an oak veneer to match the coffee bar drawers. “We also don’t have any open shelves anywhere else in the kitchen, and I love that I have space to showcase particular glassware,” she says, adding that it’s the perfect hosting setup at night and makes her smile every morning when it’s time for coffee.
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