Kitchens can get pretty cluttered if you’re not careful – and without a pantry, the mess can get worse faster than you’re expecting!
While it may surprise some of you to learn, there are a lot of kitchens out there without pantries, and those of you currently facing a kitchen without a lot of storage space are nodding in agreement right now. There’s a lot of stuff that people need to keep in a kitchen, and the space can start to run out pretty quickly, especially if you find yourself lacking in pantry space.
All is not lost, however! Even if you’ve never considered yourself the craftiest person, there’s a lot of easy and fast ways to set up a faux pantry in your kitchen to hold onto the same stuff you’d be keeping in your pantry – you know, if you had one.
Here’s a few of our favorite ideas we’ve seen for creating pantry space in a kitchen that doesn’t have a built-in pantry already:
Lockers: One of our favorite ways to create a pantry is to find some unused wall space in your kitchen and set up some home lockers! Get a few tall ones, or stack some smaller cube lockers on top of one another to create an easy-to-organize storage space that can keep your ingredients safe from the outside world thanks to their heavy metal doors.
Bookcases: If you’ve got an old bookcase around the house, it could easily become a good stand-in for a pantry or kitchen shelves if you’re hard up for space in the kitchen. Organize your dry pasta, canned goods, flour bags, and the like in whatever order best suits you, and then you can mount a shower curtain rod into the wall to hang a curtain from, acting as a pantry door to keep everything out of sight (and a little more stylish than it used to be).
Storage cubes: Storage cubes are a stylish and stackable storage solution that fit perfectly into most homes, and the kitchen can use them as well. Stack a few up either vertically or horizontally depending on your available space (or just your mood), and drill them into the walls behind them to anchor them better and let them support more weight for things like jars of sauce.
Shelves in small spaces: Chances are, if you don’t have a pantry, it’s because your kitchen is already a little crowded. Use shelving casters mounted to the bottom of a book cabinet or thin shelving unit to create a shelving system that can easily slide next to your fridge, or in between other kitchen installations to add a little extra space.
Stack up: Even if you already have some kitchen wall shelves to use, you’ll want to make some extra space on them. Use some empty plastic storage bins to help sort everything better and take up less space on your shelves, as well as keeping everything organized where you need it. Pantry organizers can also help you keep everything together.
Use another room: And if all else fails, see what you can safely store in the cold and set some wire shelves up in the garage. It’ll free up some needed room elsewhere and you can be sure you’ll still have access to your things like extra soda cans and those refried beans you haven’t needed to use yet.
