Our pantry is the heart of our homestead. Going on year five of homesteading, our pantry has seen its share of homemade canned goods from the garden rotate through. While our pantry serves a great purpose, it’s also a bit ugly. It’s tucked away at the end of our hall and hidden behind an old folding door. While looks don’t mean much to us, we do spend a ton of time at home and we enjoy investing in our home and improving it, because it only increases the overall value.
We’ve had our eye on one of those fancy glass pantry doors they sell at the home improvement stores, but with prices in the several hundreds of dollars, we just couldn’t justify purchasing one so we decided to make our own for under $20! Whether you want to make your own pantry door or not, we have a frugal tip that should help any homesteader.
Our main tip is: Buy used and save the difference! We are a frugal bunch here and I would say our frugality has allowed us to purchase our dream homestead and live a relatively free lifestyle. One of our favorite thrift stores for homestead items is the Habitat Restore. If you are not familiar, think of a thrift store for home improvement projects. They have over 900 locations across the U.S. Restores recycle and salvage doors, cabinets, windows, tools, garden implements and so much more. The prices are often good (more on this below) and per their website: Proceeds are used to help build strength, stability, self-reliance and shelter in local communities and around the world — a good deal for you, your community and the environment.
We’ve scored some amazing deals at the Habitat Restore over the years. But we’ve found the prices are hit or miss: some items are way overpriced while others are a steal. We’ve found doors and windows to be priced really low. On our homestead, we’ve got some amazing and unique windows mostly from the Habitat Restore. For example we have a really unique arched window in our homestead dog kennel which we bought for $9 from the Habitat Restore.
So about a year ago, after deciding we wanted to spruce up our pantry but couldn’t justify spending hundreds on a pre-made pantry door, we started looking for a glass door at the Habitat Restore. My wife, Jen, owns a Cricut Crafting Machine and could make a “Pantry” label for the door — or we could buy a “Pantry” decal online.
So without urgency, we’ve been checking the Habitat Restore from time to time and last week we found a perfect glass door. The price tag said $65 but at Habitat Restore they have colored tags and each tag has a specific discount, we got lucky with this door (we have been looking for quite some time) and it was 75% off. Grand total of $17 for a heavy-duty really nice glass door!
I had to work on the door a bit for it to fit in our space. Jen used her Cricut Maker to create a vinyl decal to stick to the door she also frosted the glass with some frost spray in a can. Best of all we personalized the decal. We used our little homestead logo but replaced our homestead name with the word “Pantry”. It really turned out amazing, increased the value of our home and all for under $20!
Kerry W. Mann, Jr.moved to a 20-acre homestead in 2015, where he and his family use modern technology, including YouTube and Instructables.com, to learn new skills and teach homestead projects. Connect with Kerry on hisHomestead How YouTube page, Instructables, Pinterest, Facebook, and atMy Evergreen Homestead. Read all of Kerry’s MOTHER EARTH NEWS postshere.
All MOTHER EARTH NEWS community bloggers have agreed to follow our Blogging Guidelines, and they are responsible for the accuracy of their posts.
