Custom Pantry Shelving & Organization Ideas
Make your kitchen feel twice as big with these pantry shelving ideas
An organized kitchen pantry is a must-have for the home chef, aspiring foodie, or short-order cook with a growing family. Used for storing non-perishable foods, beverages, and sometime dishes, the pantry is the cache of a kitchen. Some people even use their kitchen pantry to store cleaning supplies and linens.
Most pantries are designed as a small room with several open shelves, upon which they place their pantry essentials. This however, isn’t the best way to maximize that valuable square footage available on pantry shelves. In fact, new homeowners are always encouraged to pay careful attention to how much vertical space and storage capacity they have available in order to begin to consider new pantry shelving ideas.
In many cases, homeowners opt for creative pantry storage accessories like containers, glass jars, baskets, and bins to store and organize food, dry goods, and bulk items.
Here are a few additional creative pantry organization ideas that will help you get the optimal use out of your kitchen storage space.
1. Base Cabinets
If you have a generously sized or walk-in pantry, you can build some base cabinets that are 18ʺto 24ʺ in depth. These pantry cabinets will allow you to have closed and easy-access storage which makes keeping your pantry shelving looking neat and organized super easy. The cost of building these cabinets can run between $2,500 and $5,000 depending on the size of your pantry and the complexity of your cabinet design.
When you think about the construction of your cabinets, consider using drawers, which allow you to use the full depth of that cabinet. This gives you much more usable space than you would get with a unit with front cabinet doors. Reach-in drawers will allow you to store items like pans and cooking utensils and even some of your extra serving pieces and plates.
One more benefit to adding cabinets to your pantry is that you can top them with a butcher block, stainless steel top, or stone countertop slab to create an additional drop zone for groceries before you begin to organize them upon the various pantry shelves.
You can also add some closed-door upper pantry cabinets to store dry goods, canned goods, and even some additional bulk items or appliances. If you have the room, upper cabinets with glass-front doors allow you to create a “china hutch” effect in your pantry. In these cabinets, you can store and display all of your beautiful plates, stemware, and serving pieces. Upper cabinets can cost you another $2,500 – $5,000 depending on the size of your kitchen pantry, and adding the glass detail can add another $800 – $1,200 to your cost.
Whether or not you choose to build cabinets into your pantry, you can certainly level up your shelving by adding bulk and depth to your shelves. Instead of the standard 1ʺ shelf size, opt for a 2ʺ or 3ʺ option.
These thicker pantry shelves also allow you to conceal extra under-shelf lighting if you choose to. These bulkier floating shelves can cost anywhere from $150 to $300 per shelf.
You can also have the cabinet maker carve out a channel to hold an LED strip or mount a lighting strip to the bottom of the shelf so that you can easily identify the items you are looking for. Adding inset or surface-mounted lighting to your shelves will also help add overall brightness to your pantry and can illuminate the top of any base cabinets in the space to provide task lighting. You can find these light strips for $30 – $50 each.
If you are building a home or renovating your kitchen, don't let the pantry space become a “throwaway” when you think about designing or updating your home. Choose smart and creative ways to make this space more functional and easy to organize. If you are updating your existing pantry, think about how you can use some of these ideas to really maximize this valuable space.
Award-winning, Baton Rouge-based interior designer and content creator Arianne Bellizaire has been named a High Point Market Authority Style Spotter (2015), Perlick Ambassador of Cool (2017), Villeroy & Boch Color Challenge Winner (2017), Modenus Blog Tour invitee (2016 & 2019), and Modenus DesignHound (Spain and London 2016, Surfaces 2018). She was also selected as an Ambassador for NYDC 2020 What's New What's Next. Her work and expertise have been featured in Forbes, Rue Daily, House Beautiful, Good Housekeeping, Business Of Home, and USA Today.
