Designing deep kitchen pantry

[Sasha]

I am building kitchen cabinets and part of the design is to build a tall deep kitchen pantry. It is 8' high from floor to ceiling, 30" wide and 30" deep. I am looking for good design how to organize such deep pantry so it will be easy accessible. I'm planning in lower half of the pantry to use several pull out shelves with full extension extra heavy duty drawers. However for upper side of the pantry I didn't find solution that I would like despite I checked several of them. I do not like Lazy Suzan for this as it waists a lot of space and difficult to access for upper shelves. Any links and suggestions would be appreciated.

[SQLit]

30 inches is way to deep for the average woman to use effectively. Especially the uppers.

I offer the following link

are located in Tempe AZ and will ship all over the country. They have lots of interior organization products from lots of manufactures. They have an 800 number and used to mail catalogs out when requested.

[SteveB]

We had a problem corner. It backed up to a hallway. On the backside, we made a tall vertical access door, and used that side for vacuum cleaners, brooms, and tall items. Not sure of your configuration.

If no rear access available, I would use roll out trays.

We put rollouts on almost EVERY storage shelf in our kitchen remodel. It really makes a difference. It will be particularly helpful with your deep cabinets, but do not forget to anchor them very very good in the back so the leverage doesn't cause them to fail.

You are right to take pause and think this through.

Steve

[BobK207]

I have used a kitchen that had this type of storage, IMO this type of system has too much wasted volume.

type of system you settle on depends on what you're trying to store., you will need some sort of rollout / pullout system to take full advantage of the 30" depth

Years ago a I saw (in Sunset) a rollout floor to ceiling shelving system that could really store & give good access to a lot of stuff.

kinda like this but rolling on the floor rather than hung & very tall; floor to ceiling

is a better view but the website is SLOW and tedious!!!!

concept could be "very deep door shelves; such that are nearly 1/2 the 30" depth. When you open them you could actually step into the void created by the open doors

cheers Bob

I agree about the Lazy Susan solution; even in the best installation you'll be wasting about 25% of the space just due to the "round vs square" geometry

[Robatoy]

This might be a bit difficult to put into words, but I'll try. Build a sleeve with a partition vertically down the middle. The shape would resemble the capital letter I as in I-beam as you are facing the 'door' which covers the front of this shape. The door does not 'open' as such, it pulls straight towards you. You therefore have access to half of the cabinets volume from the left and the other half from the right. When you look at it, say from the left, you see a shelf unit 30" wide (almost) the full height and approx 15" deep. You can mount shelves between the back of the sleeve ( which is to your left and the 'door' which is to your right. The same thing on the other side if you were to observe the 'sleeve' from the right side of the door. The sleeve has to be smaller than the cabinet. Smaller by the amount you'll need to mount full exrension 100-pound ball-bearing drawer slides. Now comes the tricky part. If you stand in front of the sleeve, one drawer track will at the botton left corner, the other track will be at the top right. Both tracks will carry the load. The top track keeps the sleeve from falling over to the right. (If you were to try to put both tracks at the bottom, it would be an alignment nightmare. This way, no problem. I will make a drawing and post it on alt.binaries.pictures.woodworking... but I'm accessing the Wreck through Google as my news servers is down for repairs. Sooo.. this could be a few days.

[Roger Taylor]

We just built a kitchen with a spice pantry, and a general goods pantry. The former is just 5 3/4 inches deep by 7 ft. high. The latter is 10 inches deep and 7 ft high. 30 inches is way too deep in my experience. And eight feet high is nigh onto unreachable. I am 6 ft 4 in. and can *just* safely reach the top shelf at a little less than 7 feet high. If you are wedded to the idea of 30 in. depth, use roll-out walled shelving at waist height and below; and indented shelves above chest level, perhaps at most 1 foot deep, with some space in front of them. The other way to reduce shelf depth is to use doors with built-in shelving, that slot into the void in front of the fixed shelves. This takes special European style internal hinges to do it right.

[Upscale]

Not sure how much you want to spend on this, but Lee Valley Tools sells three different pantry units that might fill your needs.

?c=2&p=48709&cat=3,43722,43723

[Al Holstein]

I built 8 foot cabinets for our kitchen, as my wife wanted the maximum shelves. We were fortunate that we had a large skylight cut out in the kitchen otherwise we could not have stood the cabinets up to install them. So be aware of what you can install. Best of luck. I have had a lot of satisfaction from building them and much more storage than boughten ones.

Al Holstein

[Stephen M]

Your description was excellent, but I lost you on why alignment with slides at oposite corners of the I-beam-drawer-box works better.

How is that different from any other big "drawer"?

Maybe the picture will clarify

[Norminn]

It would help to know more about your needs and your plans for this space. What are you planning on using the drawers for? Is the pantry planned for food storage or cooking/serving stuff? Do you store rarely used - like the big roaster for t'giving turkey - somewhere else, like the garage?

In a space that size, it seems tall roll-out shelves would be most efficient, without the drawers below. But, then, I don't know the rest of the picture.

When we looked into a total re-do of our kitchen, the roll out shelves did not seem built to efficiently use the space. I loved the idea of drawers beneath the cooktop for pots, pans, etc., but we decided to reface cabinets and get new doors/drawers instead.

Narrow roll-outs could be used for platters, lids, canned goods, cereal boxes, hanging table linents, etc. Upper shelves, with plastic containers, can be great for stuff that is not used often - candy thermometers, cake decorating, turkey baster, formal and holiday stuff

[Sasha]

The pantry is in the kitchen adjacent to refrigerator. In lower half of the pantry I am building shelves on full extension 250# slides that have baskets for storing fruits and vegetables. In upper half of the pantry we plan to store ordinary food items: boxes of cereal, flower, honey, sugar, canned food, etc. There also items that are used rarely, like candles, boxes of foil, plastic wraps and other stuff bought as Costco. I want design that is easily accessible and full utilize entire pantry space.

[Goedjn]

Movable trolleys on a track like a garage door, complete with lift-springs and pnuematic cylinders? Either that, or a pull-out stepladder built in next to the lower shelves, or attached to the door.

[Stephen M]

IF this beast is going to be 8' tall, it would be really nice to integrate a footstool into the kitchen cabinetry somewhere. You'll need some kind of assistance to get to the top shelf.

[Goedjn]

Well, one of the houses I grew up in had 8 1/2" ceilings, and the pantry had lower drawers about 2' deep, and upper cabinets topped by drawers all the way up to the ceiling. You don't put anything you're likely to WANT very often in those top cabinets, and it takes a ladder to get to them.

[Red Cloud©]

Spiral Staircase?

rusty redcloud

[Robatoy]

When the 'drawer is as tall as a 78" x 27.25" ( an outside pantry of 30" using 5/8 gables and 3/4" thick slides) box it's like balancing a broom handle on your finger tips. It's much more stable when you grab the top... and is no need for two pairs of tracks..when one pair will do.... and those 9301 Accuride series heavy duty jobs are expensive. One at the top-right, one at the bottom left. The more you look at it, the more sense it makes.

Well.. you can try both at the bottom.. you can always move one to the top

It is posted now.

[Stephen M]

It did. Thanks.

[Mike Berger]