Do you have a pantry?

What do you use it for? Do you think it’s essential to have a pantry?

They are not that common where I live, and I have never missed having one, but I do wonder why many people think they are essential.

This is kind of bizarre. Like someone asking me if I need counter space or drawers in my kitchen. Here in the states, a pantry is typically a closet for food though it could also be a cupboard. A place where you store foods like cereals, canned goods, drinks, etc., etc. that don’t require refrigeration. They’re essential because I need a place to store my food until I’m ready to prepare it.

I do! It’s essentially a closet in the kitchen next to the refrigerator, not big enough to walk into, but with enough shelves that I can store all my canned and dry goods in it without using up a cabinet and/or keeping extra supplies in the garage. It also has space to the side of the shelves that just right for storing the broom and mop (and bucket).

This is mine except that it’s across from the fridge next to the built-in desk. We have pull-outs, too, which is great, because you can easily see and get to what’s at the back of each pull-out. Plus we didn’t have anywhere to put our broom/mop/stepladder other than the hall closet before we remodeled our kitchen. I’d love a walk-in pantry (oops, typed ‘panty’ the first time), but I’d never give up what I have.

I don’t have one but my daughter does, a room right next to the kitchen where she stores canned foods and thinks like flour. Her house is twice the size as mine, so there was more room for it, I suppose.

I have a nice large pantry. It’s great. It contains:

*the washing machine
*the dryer
*hooks for coats, dog leashes, reusable bags, etc.
*all the canned goods
*all the packaged foods (bags and boxes, like rice and pasta)
*all the drinks that don’t need refrigeration
*baking equipment
*my crock pot
*vases (which I rarely need but have just in case)
*and a lot of extra shelf space (I have pared down a lot in the last year)

I mean, I’m sure it’s easy to do without a pantry, but in my case the kitchen itself or the dining room would be extremely crowded if I didn’t have it. Where do you keep all these things?

FWIW, at one point I was thinking of putting my house on the market (I didn’t). The agent I had come by said the pantry was a definite selling point. (She didn’t like lots of things about the house, but she sure did like the pantry)

I have a pantry. Walk-in. I’m feeding alot of folks so it has come in handy.

I kinda like to hide in there occasionally.

very amusing typo there !

Maybe I don’t store as much canned food. My kitchen is about the size of the top picture here: Kitchen Wardrobe/Cabinet Ideas For Your Home | DesignCafe

If you were designing a home from scratch, could you not just make the kitchen bigger?

The washing machine is in the bathroom.

We have a walk-in pantry off the enclosed back porch where we keep our hoard of toilet paper and paper towel rolls, the majority of our mops and cleaning supplies, vacuum cleaners and a few other semi-essentials. It’s also the location of the breaker box.

If I grew potatoes it’d be good for winter storage, as it stays about 50F.

Never had nor wanted one. Last 30 years we’ve lived less than a mile from the grocery store, so shopping regularly is no problem. Plus, a good portion of our food tends to be perishables. Only reason I could imagine a pantry being desirable is is I lived in the sticks, and wanted to stock up to avoid weekly trips to the grocery.

Not just food. You might store the good china there, or other things like serving platters, a punch bowl, wine glasses, etc. Some might be stuff that doesn’t fit in regular kitchen cabinets.

When I moved into this house there was no pantry, but there was a rather pointless closet in the kitchen. Finding storage space for both cooking utensils, pots and pans, etc. as well as squeezing in food storage was quite challenging. I made the obvious step of converting the closet into a pantry, and it’s one of the best upgrades I’ve ever made to the house. The pantry has about 30 feet of shelving and it’s usually nearly full. I can’t imagine how I used to manage without it.

Yep. Top shelves are for small kitchen appliances.

I don’t, but I have a living room closet that’s just full of junk that we can’t even open because there’s furniture in front of the door. One wall of that closet is the corner of the kitchen wall. I’ve been meaning to move that door to the kitchen wall to make it a pantry for years but have just never gotten around to it. It would instantly solve a lot of other problems we have in the kitchen, but I still have a lot of other bigger fish to fry.

I dislike the shopping process. I recall my dad used to run down to the grocery pretty much every day. Maybe it gave him something to do. Surprisingly as someone who grew up during the Depression or near enough, he wasn’t much into stockpiling or hoarding “pencils, too short to sharpen” and “bits of yarn and string” carefully catalogued into near storage bins in the garage.

We like to buy things on sale, and have a good basic supply of pantry cooking staples to avoid frustration when the urge strikes to cook something a bit more elaborate. Snowstorms, illness, any number of reasons really why avoiding travel for whatever issues can be nice, too. When all the Wuhan Flu lockdowns started in earnest, and all these idiots were panic buying building Ft. Charmin in their living room, we found ourselves well positioned to weather supply chain breakdowns. Quite a large number of items don’t take up much room at all and don’t spoil or need any attention, and I agree with other posters that it definitely need not apply to food items only. I’m still going through boxes of garbage bags bought long ago. Done slowly and methodically, don’t scare the womenfolk and horses, can build up a nice supply of household items. Monetary inflation assures many items have only increased in price, or quality declined, quantity declined, etc. It’s a form of savings, it starts to add up over time.

My house used to have quite a large pantry, all along one end of the kitchen; but at some point long before I moved here the dividing wall between here and the kitchen had been taken out. So what I’ve actually got is a lovely very large kitchen with lots of cabinets (and a washing machine in the far corner), but no pantry. The result of this is that, despite the cabinets, I store a lot of what I would have stored in the pantry in various other places around the house, and in the off season some of it sometimes winds up in the packing shed.

The usefulness, or degree of necessity, of a pantry probably depends both on how often you go shopping (in my case, often not for two or three weeks) and on how much you cook and what sort of cooking you do (I tend to cook in bursts and eat the leftovers on the other days; but when I do cook I want a good choice of ingredients available, and of pots/pans/bowls/utensils/jars/freezer containers. And some of my pots are Large.)

Is one of the problems finding room for the fish, and/or the large frying pan? :smile:

One of the big selling points of the manufactured home we chose was the big deep pantry in the kitchen. Not a walk-in, but pretty cool. We stuff it with canned goods because my husband goes through twenty cans a week.

We did not have a lot of money growing up and we didn’t have a house that came with a pantry, but my stepdad built a huge one himself and put it in our kitchen.

We have a large food closet. It could be called a 'walk in" but only a step or two.

OP: where you put the many dozens of jars of stuff you canned which grew in your garden? [Surely almost everyone here has a garden except lazy bums like myself.]