My wife and I love our house, but one of our gripes is the pantry size. We knew it was going to be an issue when we bought the house but did not expect it to annoy us as much as it does. Last week the pantry had its fate sealed when I came home from work on Thursday and my wife had all of our food out on the bar with a hammer waiting for me. "Gut it out" she said.

Our plan is to get rid of all the permanent shelving that is spaced 14" and install full pullouts (3-5) on the bottom half. The top half will be finished with standard shelving on an adjustable track so we can move them around as need be. I might try and work in some rope lighting to help see better as well.

The photos below show my work in progress. I made the boxes our of 4" poplar and a 1/2 birch plywood bottom.







Progress...


Everything Out


Patched up and re-painted for a fresh new look


First Box in


First box working


More to come as the project continues this weekend.


[This message has been edited by jetescamilla (edited 12/16/2010 10:36a).]

I'm very interested to see how this turns out and approximate cost. The wife would love if I did this for her too.

we must live in the same neighborhood. Our pantry look exactly the same. Can't wait to see finished and run it by the SO. Keep up the good work!

i want/need a pantry so bad.

I finished making the 3rd box yesterday after work and installed the 2nd. We now have most of our pantry back into just 2 sliding units. Unfortunately the 3rd slider is messed up and I have to return it. This happened at 10:00 so I could not make a trip to Home Depot. With a Company Christmas party tonight, it will not get done until Saturday or Sunday.

We are debating about making 1 more sliding shelve before installing standard (adjustable) shelving. I will add more photos when they get uploaded.

ISU and mckinney if you want to see our inspiration check out shelf genie. Except we are not going to take the shelves the full way up, it would be hard to see past eye level.

How deep is your pantry? Ours is a similar width but yours looks deeper. I would also be curious as to how much this project cost. It may be something I will look into in the future for our pantry.

I will be in the same boat shortly, my pantry is full all the time and I live alone

I LOVE this place, maybe one day I can afford to deck my kitchen out with their stuff.

http://www.rev-a-shelf.com/Common/ProductSeries.aspx?Class=Tall/Pantry%20Acc.&Family=Wood%20Accessories&Category=Pantries&Series=4WP%20Series

Each shelf is about 2' by 2'. The pantry itself is about 30"x24".

I now have 3 pull out shelves in and they are holding about 75% of our old pantry in it. Pretty good so far. Unfortunately my wife went to HD to get dowels for me and I didnt realize how much lighter they were in color. So it is now noticeably different. Oh well.

3 Drawers in


Can drawer open


Dog watching the food


3 Drawers being used

Okay so after some time off I was finally able to get the rest of the shelving in. I used some stain ready sheets of pine with a nice 1" trim to face the front of the shelves. For the track I used some basic garage shelving track with adjustable tabs to put the shelves at the locations we want.

All in all we went from 5 15" deep shelves that were permanent to 5 adjustable shelves that are 22", 22", 17", 15" and 15" deep. We also have 3 full pull out shelves that are 26" x 25". We went from 2325 sq inches of usable pantry shelving to 4771 sq inches. We more than doubled our pantry space!!!

yes the food goes on the shelves...



Shelves on the track...



Food on the shelves with the trim added on. Note that there are actually two more shelves above that are not yet put in.



Close up of the track and a hook for grilling accessories.



Food on shelves and front trim shown. Again, there are two more shelves that are not shown, you can see the tabs where they go. The very top one is not very convenient but will be used for seasonal dishes or rarely used appliances.



Note that the bottom two 20" shelves are quite a bit deeper than the original 15" shelves we had. My wife is using lazy susans and rotating racks to make items in the back more accessible. We will be hitting up Ikea tomorrow to get a couple more.



[This message has been edited by jetescamilla (edited 1/9/2011 12:49a).]

Great idea and how to pics!

Deserves a bump as this is the basis for one of the projects that I'll be doing this spring...

My pantry looks about the same as yours. I recently added some shelves too. I did it a little differently. I used 1x2s to extend the shelf supports out to the door frame. I then put in 4 inch shelves on the 1x2s at the same places as the existing shelves. I used similar wood and paint as the existing shelves so they look the same. My new 4 inch by 11 inch shelves are perfect for cans and spices. It ended up clearing out a bunch of space for all the other stuff.

Seeing this thread bumped makes me sad