Pantry remodel

I have just simple shelves in a pantry closet. We will probably remodel the kitchen sometime in the future, and I am always looking for great kitchen ideas. I think I would like to move our pantry from the end of the wall of cabinets to the corner. I hate the corner cabinets anyway, and I don't use the counter in the corner of the kitchen either.

I have seen designs that use the corner of a kitchen for a pantry closet, and many of them have a regular size door. Inside the closet it can be simple open shelving. There are many pictures on-line when I search for corner pantry photos.

Here are a couple of photos I found:

We have friends that have a little cafe. They saved Gallon Glass jars for me. I use them to store pasta, flour, sugar and other dry items.Throw in a couple bay leaves to keep out the mealy bugs and they keep forever. (Do not last that long but never have had problems) You might want to have at least one shelf for taller than 12 in items. That is a little on the low side.

The pantry that was in our house when we moved in had pull out shelves. They're gone now. They were breaking under the weight of cans and I finally removed them and installed regular shelving. (Yes, I do these things at our house ). Anyway, I made the shelves different depths and staggered them so that you could easily see what was way behind on each shelf. That made a huge difference. I also varied the heights of the shelves to accommodate most anything one would need to store. Rather than baskets, I used clear plastic containers for those odd little doo-dads that we accumulate. The baskets required pulling out to see the contents and that's hard on my arthritic hands. Sounds like a fun project for you. Best of luck.

You are so lucky. That sounds like a fun project and the opportunity to customize it is really cool. I am actually planning a re-organization of the pantry project, so maybe you can use or will get some ideas from mine. Our kitchens were always small and somewhat lacking in storage space, so when we moved, a pantry was at the top of my wish list. I finally got my pantry and had all these big ideas of what I wanted to do with it and how I wanted to organize it. Of course once I got it all situated the way I thought I wanted it, I realized that what I thought I wanted and what I actually wanted and would work the best were different.

It sounds like your pantry will have lots of room, but you might want to add a few extra inches to compensate for the extra space that the pull out shelves and baskets will take up and add a few inches to the space between the shelves to allow for the occasional taller items (cereal boxes, odd bottles and the like). My pantry is kind of an L shape with an angle at the top of the L. I have 4 shelves for each portion of the (L) with an 11" space between each, except for the top shelf, I have a 30" space from the shelf to the ceiling. The shelves on the short part of the L are 11" deep and 16" deep on the longer part and from the floor up to the bottom of the shelf is about 17". My original thought was to put in pull out trays and maybe baskets that would have been attached to the existing shelves, in retrospect, I am glad I didn't, in my case it would not be practical and I like the flexibility to rearrange as needed instead. Like you, I am a scratch cook with cans, jars, assorted boxes etc.. I put all the heavy items on the bottom shelf so if the unthinkable happens they won't have far to fall. I keep my unopened bags of flour and granulated sugar in large 2 1/2 gallon Jumbo zip lock type bags you can get at least three bags (2 standing 1 laying on top of the two) in there and if you get little "guests" they are confined to the bag and you can toss the whole bag and won't have to deal with an infestation (been there done that, had to replace every single thing in the cupboards). Open bags get dumped into rubbermaid containers. I use a square 19 cup rubbermaid container that is 9" x 9" x 4" to hold brown sugar (you can fit about 4 flattened bags in there). For the re-organization, I am going to get some of the larger rectangular containers for baking mixes and smaller rectangles for the smaller pouch mixes and some of my seasoning packets (I also use the smaller 5 1/4" x 5 1/4" squares and rectangular 8 3/4" x 5 3/4" for taco seasoning, dressing mix, gravy mixes etc). I can stack them and still see what's what. I apologize for the length, I tried to think of what I wish I had known and what works for me may not work for you, but one idea leads to another. I hope it helps in some way. You will definitely have more fun with your project, than I will with mine, not looking forward to emptying the pantry, I know it will be worth the hassle. I think you are on the right track, just have fun with it and do what makes you happy. Would love to know how it comes out.

tkins