It is possible that pantries are the new closets. This year many of my clients requested pantry design and reorganization services. For some reason, when it comes to kitchen cupboards, dry food storage is either overlooked or over-designed but there are lots of tricks to make whatever you’ve got work.
Pantries often have to do double duty as food storage and overflow small appliance storage. If you feel like you are short on space for food, take a look at your pantry and determine if you could store any non-food items elsewhere. Things I often see that take up a lot of room are cases of beverages, massive bags of dog food, ice chests, cake platters, and paper towels in bulk packages. All of these items might be stored in a laundry room if there is space, or the garage.
If you have a lot of small appliances such as blenders, slow cookers, waffle makers and such, consider adding a baker’s rack to your kitchen if there is room and use the pantry cupboards just for food. Since small appliances aren’t attractive to display on a baker’s rack, exchange your best casseroles, serving dishes and good-looking cast iron pans that were in the cupboard for the small appliances. With the small appliances hidden away, you could put the better-looking and more often used items on the baker’s rack.
As always, don’t overbuy. If you have a pantry that seems too crowded, consider buying only one, maybe two of items you use regularly. Containerize bulky things and things that tend to spill, such as pasta, flour and sugar. This doesn’t mean that you have to transfer them from their original container to a canister, but containerize them in a rectangular wooden, acrylic or tightly-woven seagrass box. You can pile those ungainly bags of macaroni on top of each other in a box whereas n a shelf they fall over and take more than their fair share of room.
Put small items that tend to scatter in plastic shoe bins or acrylic containers and label the containers. This is perfect for categories like “cake decorating supplies,” “cookie cutters,” spices, teas or various types of baking chocolate.
I’m typically not a fan of plastic risers for canned goods and tend to just make rows of similar products such as soups, tomato sauces and pastes, vegetables, and canned fish. However, if you have only one or two cans of each thing and deep shelving, rows don’t make sense and risers help to see what the heck is behind the creamed corn and the cocktail onions.
I also don’t love a lazy Susan, but sometimes that is the only thing that works for spices or bottles of vitamins so that you can see what you have more easily. I prefer laying down all spices in a shallow drawer either alphabetically or in categories of herbs with herbs, chiles with other peppers, aromatic spices like cloves and cinnamon and exotic spices like za’atar and turmeric. However, a lot of kitchens require that drawer space for utensils and knives. If you don’t mind utensils in a jug by the stove and knives on magnetic wall hangers, you might be able to free up a drawer for spices.
If you are designing a pantry from scratch, keep it simple and flexible. Make shelving moveable (up or down) if possible. You don’t need as much clearance for canned goods as you do for cereal boxes, so plan accordingly.
Remember that the real estate between the height of your hips and shoulders is prime, so leave that for the food and items you use most often. Heavy items could go on the floor if you need the space. Upper shelves should be left for light items rarely used or overflow paper goods. Soft body empty ice chests, ice buckets, plastic summer dishes and picnic baskets are perfect for upper shelves.