“Happy wife. Happy life.” My wife insists that I passionately believe that old adage.
To make my wife the happiest cook in the campground (or at least at our site in the campground), I modified the pantry in our Flagstaff 21DS. This four-beer project began with removing the factory shelves from the pantry.
In their place I screwed in a pair of Rev-A-Shelf heavy duty pull-out wire shelf stacks (model 5WB2-0922CR-1 fit our trailer), about $100 each from Amazon. These shelves fully extend and are rated for 100 pounds, which makes them perfect for a pantry. The lower unit bolted into the pantry floor. Remounting one of the factory wooden shelves halfway up provided a base for the upper shelf stack.
The shelves were mounted flush against the refrigerator side of the pantry, which allows space on the other side for cutting boards, griddle and other vertical objects. A pair of removable webbing straps keep the shelves from moving when we’re on the road.
Wife loves the new shelves. Husband loves them, too, especially when he discovers that someone has moved his flask of Cognac to the very back of the top shelf.
Next came the spices. We’ve seen many, many ideas about where to put a spice rack in the trailer. The person I need to make happy did not want anything mounted on an outside wall (too hot) or exposed to a window (no sunlight). My solution was to put the spices into the pantry.
I bought some six-by-nine-inch bamboo stackable drawer organizers from Lowe’s (about $6 each). Using my wife’s best one-inch-wide emery board nail file (she was gone), I sanded inch-wide notches in the sides for elastic straps to go across. The boxes were then carefully screwed into the fat part of the pantry door. With Amazon providing spice bottles and labels, my wife filled the racks with her spicy favorites.
The one downside to this arrangement was that the pantry door handle kept the door from fully opening. We couldn’t extend the sliding shelves past the spice boxes. After considering various options, I solved that problem by simply grinding a bit off the door handle bases. It’s a bit more difficult to grip, but the family cook says that’s a small price to pay for having everything so handy.
She’s happy, which means I’m happy. She even brought me another beer.
