If the home has 5 bedrooms and a kitchen island the length of a bowling alley then you need to supersize the pantry as well. Or if that’s too much, give us a standard closet size at least.
Builders are getting away with installing completely impractical pantries. Our fridges have swelled in size to accomodate the overwhelming amounts of groceries we haul home yet our cupboards haven’t evolved.
At first glance this pantry might not look so bad, just the picture I took of it. That’s the angle I had to stand at to get the hidden shelving in the shot.
The space is so narrow you have to twist your arm to reach anything beyond the door jamb and so dark it’s like a lucky dip grab.
It looks like the designer meant to stop and accidentally kept dragging their hand across the page. The tail of shelving has so much potential which is what makes it so frustrating. Someone bothered to do the work to install it and instead it’s sitting there, unusable, taunting you every time you open the door.
Yes, you could simply store the overflow items in surrounding cabinets, most new kitchens have a reasonable amount of general storage, however this solution doesn’t work for me for 2 reasons.
- I’m too short to reach any upper cabinets and
- I can’t seem to keep inventory of items when they’re spaced out across multiple locations.
In the one home that I lived in without a pantry I ended up buying many ingredient duplicates which is another reason why it was immediately added to my avoid list for any future homes.
Pantries are essential, a home feature you will use every day, often multiple times a day and yet they seem to go unnoticed unless they’re a show stopping masterpiece.
Home builders need to put more priority on decent sized pantries. I would love to see double door or walk-in pantries become the standard, especially for homes designed for larger families.
Double ovens and 3 car garages are becoming more common so surely builders can find some space in the budget, and plans, for a little extra shelving.