I bought an upright freezer during the pandemic. It has lots of shelves and drawers. I was afraid large items wouldn’t fit, but i was wrong. A couple of the shelves are large enough for a whole goose or turkey, and all of the shelves comfortably hold a frozen pizza.
I can’t tell you how much i love that freezer.
It’s a Beko (because supply-chain problems, and that was literally the only one available). I think it was designed for the British market, although it uses US power. But it’s taller and narrower (left to right) than a standard US appliance. That turns out to use my space better than a standard appliance.
Somehow, everything is reachable and easy to find. I’m so glad i bought this one, and not the chest freezer i thought i was shopping for.
I have no clue how to post a picture, to be honest.
(It might be secret knowledge, is my best guess!)
But, if you look up, on Amazon:
Mini Style Crystal Chandelier Pendant Light White, you’ll be able to see it. It was easy to install, a titch fussy to assemble, but looks amazing! ($67.88, must have gone up, it was less when I purchased!)
When we did our big remodel 19 year ago, we built what we call our pantry. It’s a relatively shallow but wide closet with double doors and 4 long shelves mounted on adjustable brackets. We even installed light, tho it does little past the top 2 shelves.
I like that it’s just over a foot deep - makes it harder for things to get lost. And the width, 6’ or so, lets me organize all the stuff within. The only thing I’m not crazy about is that the shelves are the wire-type one usually finds in linen closets. Sometimes, narrower items fall over. But I can deal. Overall, it’s the best pantry space I’ve ever had.
Make sure your pantry shelves have rails in front, otherwise all your carefully conserved food will become a useless mess of broken glass and bags on the floor. Experience talking here.
We have this huge ancient farmhouse … but no pantry, because the kitchen was completely remodeled five years previous to our moving there, by someone who lived very modernly. A moderate number of cabinets, but when I think of my grandmother’s closet full of jam, canned tomatoes and pickles and vegetables, her huge stuffed freezer, all from her own garden and orchard, I feel very shorted. We do have a full cellar but it is unholy damp down there. Now that my food garden and apple orchard are gaining steam, I will be hard pressed to store my harvest. A problem to be solved in the future.
Wait wait - isn’t this just a laundry room? My mom’s house has a laundry room off her kitchen with all the same stuff as you have, minus the food, but plus HVAC.
When mom had her kitchen remodeled 20 years ago she had a pantry added - it’s just a floor-to-ceiling cabinet next to the fridge, about the size of the fridge, with pull-out shelves. It was quite a fancy upgrade, though! It is where all of her cans and dry goods go.
I do not have a pantry in my kitchen. I often think about how the next owner of this house is not gonna like my kitchen. No dishwasher, no pantry, no range hood, gas capped off, laminate counter tops. It’s actually a newly-renovated kitchen. I just built it to suit my needs - a single person who never cooks. I’m hoping that when I go to sell it, the realtor describes it as “for the busy person who has no time to be at home!”
FWIW I store my bulk items (pop, Gatorade, Costco-sized purchases, etc) in the guest room closet.
I have a pantry. It’s a cupboard into which a can take a couple of steps
before the ceiling slopes down as it’s under a staircase. The corner
where the ceiling meets the floor is wasted, but in front of that are plastic
crates which hold rarely/never used kitchen appliances.
Above that are shelves where we keep dried and canned foods.
On one wall are racks which hold plastic crates of food containers (of which
about 3% are ever used !) and some more shelves of dried/canned food,
biscuits (cookies) and cereals.
On the opposite walls are the electric and gas meters and fuse box.
On the floor are bottles of booze, fruit juice and cooking oils, a slow cooker,
and the cat food.
That’s better for storing some storage crops, though it’s worse than others; and canned stuff will probably hold up for long enough for you to eat it, if it’s shelved up off the floor. Check ideal humidity levels for specific crops – apples are one of the things that like high humidity. I have a neat little booklet done by Tracy Frisch and can look up specific crops for you if you want to send me a list.
A lot of old root cellars are quite damp. The best ones can be aired out when the temperature’s suitable.
But if there’s any chance of critters getting into the cellar (and, if you have an old dry-laid stone foundation, if it’s done right it should be really long-lasting but yes, critters can get into your cellar), you may need a mouse-proof cabinet to keep some things in (put some vents in it); or to hang them from the ceiling.
Ima going to have to look into it. I also am looking to create a cheese aging cabinet as well. Cheese needs cool, dark, damp, with airflow, which is why caves are so good. Do not have a cave.
To me, “laundry room” suggests the “laundry room” in the house where I grew up (and where my mom still lives). It has a washer, a dryer, a furnace, and a single very small shelf big enough to fit a few miscellaneous tools in.
My current pantry, in contrast, has probably 2-3x more room for food than for laundry appliances.
It’s weird to hear you say “minus the food” because in my opinion it’s precisely the space for food that makes it a pantry. Obviously your definition may vary.
(And the real estate person called it a pantry, by the way, not a laundry room. Though that may have been because it doesn’t have a door, I suppose.
Well yeah BUT if my mom put her canned goods in there would it become a pantry?
Actually come to think of it when I was a kid, pre-kitchen-remodel at mom’s house (which added the pantry closet I described), we did in fact keep food in that room, in the same cabinets that exist now. Now they are full of cleaners and soaps but in the 80s when 4 of us lived there it had cereal, cans, snacks, etc.
So I guess my family kept food in the laundry room, and you keep your laundry in the pantry
My mom had a mud room that had the laundry stuff in it. It wasn’t “the laundry room” because it was right next to the door, had hooks and coats and boots and places to drop what your were carrying… And it has a washer and dryer and a cabinet with laundry supplies.
I have a laundry room that has washer and dryer and a cabinet with laundry supplies… And a fold-out ironing board, and a commercial-style sink, and mops and the kitty litter trays and spare kitty litter. I guess it also has a wine rack on the wall. But it’s next to the mud room, and not close to the kitchen, and not a pantry.
We have a large, deep cabinet next to the fridge. One cabinet door is as tall as the fridge, plus another above it to the ceiling. It’s nice to have the space for dry and canned goods. Except it always seems to be full, no matter how much I use up stuff.
The house I grew up in had a big walk-in pantry with saloon type double swinging doors. That house had a lot of unusual features, though.
Oh, my current pair of laundry machines are in my hallway in a nook that takes space away from the master bedroom and bath. Loud as heck when it hits the spin cycle.
This morning, and the next week or so here in the midwest, it occurred to me again why I like a few basics stocked up. 6” of snow, more on the way, and the daily highs forecast below zero. I don’t want to go anywhere, and thankfully no need to day. If I could hibernate, I would.
We have a pantry cabinet, fairly wide (45"?) with two doors and slide-out shelves. Very luxe, for us. We remodeled our kitchen about 12 years ago and that was a must have. My Japanese husband, who does the grocery shopping and cooking, is a speculative shopper. He buys canned or dried foods that he thinks he will use “pretty soon” and it all goes in the pantry until he thinks of using it, which sometimes seems to be never.
There is a packrat tendency in many Japanese I have known, and the concept of available storage space is completely unknown to them, because every inch and more is already stuffed with stuff. The only cabinets in the kitchen that are available to me are the high ones, like the one over the refrigerator, because I can reach them and he can’t. I don’t have much to store, just my row of tea caddies and a few odds and ends that I should get rid of anyway, so I’m fine with that. Which is a good thing, I’m not allowed to complain about anything in the kitchen, because I “don’t cook.”
I’ve read previous thread suggesting that homemade soup stock is really good and so I’d like to have the space for a big stockpot. That’s the sort of thing I’d like to have in a pantry.
Loud as heck when it hits the spin cycle.