Like a lot of folks, our kitchen is the central hub of our home. I love to cook and spend hours in the kitchen almost every day. Our existing kitchen pantries have been a source of consternation since we moved into our house 8 years ago. I’ve been dreaming about tearing out these pantries and doing something new since then. Well, after meeting with 3 cabinet companies and hearing various reasons why they couldn’t build what I wanted, I decided to build it myself. I posted a couple of pictures of the original pantries here. They were basically 3′ x 3′ closets with cheap metal shelving. All of the space inside above the door head jamb was unusable space.
Existing Pantry Left
Existing Pantry Right
The skeleton of the new pantry cabinets or the “Space Tower” as I like to call it. We chose full extension slides instead of regular shelves due to the extreme depth of the cabinets. Being able to pull out the shelves will give access to the rear of the cabinets and make them much more useful. With fixed shelves, accessing things stored in the rear was always an exercise in futility. Here we have developed the entire 9′ height of the wall for storage and can reach into the deepest corners of the pantry. Each drawer provides 37.5″ wide by 28″ deep of that blessed storage.
After demolition and refinishing the space behind the fridge & existing pantries, we constructed and installed home-shop built pantry cabinets. These shelves all rest on Blum undermount drawer full extension slides. We will decide on door fronts and finishes in the coming months and will use the pull out drawers “as-is” in the meantime. Upper areas were “dead” space before and while we will have to use a step stool to access these areas, it has opened up a massive storage space we didn’t have before. We may reconfigure the drawer locations after we use them for a while. Also since we are currently deciding on new cabinets for other areas of the kitchen, we want to match everything. So, waiting on the doors/fronts is probably the best course of action. The Sketchup drawing below that I created during the design process should give an indication of the final look.
