Building a Home – Pantry

In looking back on the pantry workflow I found that most of the pantry’s that I was coveting the most aren’t on my Pinterest Pantry board.  That must mean that I pulled them from magazines.  (While Pinterest is handy, I found that making an actual 3 ring binder with magazine clippings was easier to convey my ideas to builders and subs that we worked with.)

I had my cabinet designer, Valerie, design a pantry that was beautiful.  It was gorgeous and I was so excited about it.  But then a small error was made when the pantry walls were poured (they’re concrete to make it a safe area in a storm) and the pantry shrunk in size.  Therefore, the awesome design that we already had needed to be scrapped for something simpler.  This honestly turned out to be a blessing because it saved us a ton of money and we still have lots of space in our pantry and tons of storage throughout the house for other things.

Once we got the final measurements determined, I sat down with our cabinet company and we worked up a plan for the pantry.  I wanted cabinets on the bottom half to keep our dog out of food and to not leave lots of space un-utilized like I felt we had in our old house.  But I didn’t want the cabinets to go on all walls so that there would be space to “take cover” in case of a tornado.  I also wanted a counter top so that I could place large appliances on it and shelves above that would be adjustable.

I’m very pleased with the way the pantry turned out.  I actually forgot that I had drawers the first time I tried to organize it and realized that they would be a perfect place for my extra “party” silverware.  We’ve also got kids foods like oatmeal and mac and cheese hidden in the drawers.

I was able to organize the pantry even more with lots of glass and plastic canisters that I found on Joss and Main.  I found that it was a great way to gets lots of containers to store flour, rice, cereal, etc in at much less than just buying them from Target.  

We’re still getting used to the pantry and will probably re-organize it a handful of other times before I’m totally satisfied with it.  But for right now the lack of product boxes, the ability to see what we have, and the clean lines of the space make me happy and very thankful that we went with a custom cabinetry pantry that looks like this rather than saving just a little bit of money for a pantry full of shelving.