Custom Pantry Storage

A Pantry You Can See the Back Of

Most pantries fail for the same reason. The shelves are too deep. A standard pantry cabinet is built on the same twenty-four inch depth as the base cabinets beside it, and a can of tomatoes is about four inches across. That shelf holds five or six rows of cans, and the only row anyone sees is the front one. The rest turn into duplicates, because it is easier to buy another jar of cumin than to empty a shelf looking for the first one.

Wine-ohs builds pantry storage in Irvine homes around a simple rule: every item should be visible from where you stand, or it should come out to you when you pull a handle. How we get there depends on the space you have, the cabinets already in the room, and how your household shops.

Three Ways to Build It

Tall pull-out pantries

A tall pull-out is a narrow cabinet, often twelve to eighteen inches wide, with a full-height frame of shelves that slides out on heavy-duty runners. You open it from the side and see both faces at once. They fit well in the gap beside a refrigerator or at the end of a run of base cabinets. The trade-off is weight: a fully loaded pull-out carries a lot of canned goods, so the runners and the cabinet box both need to be rated for it. We do not put a tall pull-out into a particleboard box that is already sagging.

Shallow pantry walls

Where there is a free wall, a run of pantry cabinets twelve to sixteen inches deep usually stores more usable food than a walk-in. Cans and boxes sit one or two rows deep with adjustable shelves spaced to the heights of what you keep. In many Irvine townhomes and the smaller Woodbridge floor plans, this is the better use of the square footage, because a walk-in spends much of its area on the door swing and the aisle.

Rebuilt walk-in and closet pantries

Some homes, especially newer builds near the Great Park and in Portola Springs, came with a walk-in pantry lined in wire shelving or deep melamine boards. Those rooms are often worth keeping and refitting. We replace deep shelves with shallower ones on the back wall, add drawers low down for bulk bags and potatoes, leave a clear stretch of counter height for a microwave or a small appliance, and add an outlet and lighting where the plans and permit allow it.

Planning Before Building

The first step is a walkthrough. We look at what you keep now, where it lives, and what gets bought in bulk. We measure the tallest cereal boxes, the oil bottles and the paper towel rolls, because shelf spacing that ignores them wastes a shelf height on every level.

A few questions that change the design:

• Do you shop weekly or stock up monthly? A bulk household needs deeper low storage and fewer small shelves.
• Where does the food get unloaded? A pantry near the garage entry saves carrying bags across the kitchen.
• Which appliances live on the counter? A pantry with a powered shelf can take the toaster and coffee maker off the counter.
• Who needs to reach it? Kids, a shorter adult or someone with limited reach all change what goes on the top shelf.

What It Costs and What Moves It

A tall pull-out added to an existing run usually lands in the lower thousands, depending on width, hardware and whether the cabinet box is new. A full pantry wall or a rebuilt walk-in sits higher, roughly $7,000 to $24,000 for most Irvine homes, and moves with the number of drawers, the cabinet construction, the countertop section if there is one, and whether an electrician adds outlets or lighting. Kitchen lighting in California has to meet Title 24 efficacy rules, so new pantry lighting is specified to comply rather than picked off a shelf.

Condos, Townhomes and Association Review

If your home is under an association, check the architectural guidelines before scheduling. Cabinet work inside your unit often needs little review, while added circuits or opened walls may need approval and a City of Irvine permit. We can provide drawings and product sheets for the application.

Call (949) 765-3306 to set up a pantry walkthrough.