Custom Pantry Cabinets for Woodbury Kitchens

Twelve inches or twenty-four. Before anyone talks about door styles, that one number decides whether a pantry works. A 12 inch deep cabinet holds everything one or two cans deep, so nothing hides and plain shelves are enough. A 24 inch deep cabinet holds roughly twice as much behind the same doors, but only if the shelves roll out. On fixed shelves, the back half becomes the place where the second jar of peanut butter goes to expire.

Every pantry cabinet project starts from that choice: tall cabinets in a kitchen run, pantry walls that replace a reach-in pantry, pull-out pantry units in a narrow gap, and cabinetry inside walk-in and butler's pantries. Woodbury Custom Cabinetry designs, builds, and installs all of it as part of our custom kitchen cabinets work, either with a new kitchen or added to the one you have. This page covers depth, height, rollouts and pull-outs, the pantry layouts common in Woodbury houses, when a ready-made cabinet or wire shelving is the smarter buy, and what moves the price.

Rollout Trays, Pull-Out Pantries, and Door Storage

The interior is where a pantry cabinet earns its price, and there are three ways to bring the back of the cabinet to you. Each one fits a different width and a different way of shopping.

Rollout Trays Inside a Tall Pantry Cabinet

Rollouts are shallow drawers behind the doors, each on its own pair of full-extension slides. You open the doors, then pull the tray you want, and the back of the shelf is at the front. Three details decide whether they work. First, the trays have to clear the hinges and the door, so on face-frame cabinets they sit on spacers, and the doors have to open far enough for a tray to pass. A tall cabinet tight against a side wall needs a filler strip so its door can swing clear. Second, the spacing should follow what you store: tall bottles and cereal boxes low, cans and jars at eye level. Third, the front lip of each tray should be high enough to stop a can rolling off when you pull it, without blocking the view inside.

Full-Height Pull-Out Pantry Units

A pull-out pantry is a single tall frame of baskets or shelves attached to the door. One pull brings the whole pantry out into the room, and you can reach it from both sides. It's the best way to use a narrow gap, the narrow space left beside a range or refrigerator that would otherwise become a filler or a broom slot. The trade-off is that the whole load rides on one set of slides. Rev-A-Shelf, one of the major makers, rates the slide system on its 5700 series pantry pull-outs at 250 pounds, with soft-close slides at the top and bottom. That is a rating for the whole unit, not each shelf. A wide pull-out loaded with canned goods is heavy to pull and hard on the slides, which is why wide pantries usually get rollouts instead.

Door-Mounted Pantry Racks

Shallow racks on the back of a pantry door put spices and small jars at eye level, and on a 12 inch cabinet they're often the best use of the door. On a 24 inch cabinet they cost interior depth: every inch the rack sticks out comes off the shelves or rollouts behind it, so trays get shortened to clear the rack. Pick one or the other for each cabinet, and draw it before the boxes are built.

Reach-In Pantry Conversions and Pantry Layouts in Woodbury Houses

Census surveys count 8,460 Woodbury housing units built in the 1990s, and many of their kitchens came with the same pantry: a narrow reach-in with a bifold or swing door and wire shelves. Trading that reach-in for a wall of 24 inch deep cabinets with rollout trays is one of the most common kitchen requests we get from houses of that era. The other layouts below come up almost as often.

Reach-In Pantry Conversion: Wire Shelves Out, Cabinets In

Industry histories put wire shelving in 40 million American homes by 1995, and the reach-in pantry was one of its standard places. It is cheap, it lets crumbs fall through to the shelf below, and on a deep wire shelf the back row is where things get lost. There are two ways to convert it. The lighter one keeps the walls and fits cabinet boxes or rollouts inside the opening, which works when the opening is wide enough for the doors and trays to clear the jambs. The bigger one takes the reach-in walls out entirely and runs tall cabinets across the space, which usually gains usable storage and lines the pantry up with the rest of the kitchen. Removing the walls means framing, drywall, and a floor patch, because the flooring often stops at the old walls. That work gets its own line on the estimate, and the outlet or light switch that lived on those walls gets moved by a licensed electrician.

Angled Corner Pantries

Some builder plans put the pantry in the corner of the kitchen behind a door set at an angle. Inside, the shelves are triangles that are deepest at the back corner, the least reachable spot in the room. Fitting rollouts into a corner pantry rarely works, because the trays have to be narrow to clear the angled door frame. The better options are shallow shelving on the two side walls with the corner left open, or removing the corner pantry and running straight tall cabinets, which also squares off the counter run beside it.

Pantry Cabinets on an Exterior Wall

In a Minnesota winter an exterior wall is the coldest surface in the kitchen, and a tall cabinet pushed tight against it holds that chill. HomeAdvisor's pantry guide gives 50 to 70 degrees as the ideal pantry range, so a cool wall isn't a problem by itself. The concern is moisture: when warm, humid kitchen air reaches a cold surface, condensation can form, and a closed cabinet back with no air movement is a place for it to sit. On an exterior wall, the better detail lets air move behind the cabinet rather than sealing it hard to the wall, and an interior wall is the better spot for a pantry if the layout allows. If the wall itself is cold to the touch, that's an insulation question for a building contractor before it's a cabinet question.

Tall Pantry Cabinet Beside the Refrigerator

Putting the pantry next to the refrigerator makes sense: groceries come in, cold goes one way and dry goes the other. The detail to check is the refrigerator door. Many refrigerators need their doors to open past 90 degrees before the crisper drawers will slide out, and a tall cabinet on the hinge side can stop the door short. The refrigerator's installation guide lists the clearance it needs, and we design the filler or panel between the two from that number, not from the cabinet catalog. Above a standard-depth refrigerator, a 24 inch deep cabinet with a door you can reach is usually better storage than a 12 inch cabinet you need a stool for.

When a Ready-Made Pantry Cabinet or Wire Shelving Is the Better Buy

Custom pantry cabinets are the right answer for a lot of kitchens, but not all of them. These are the cases where we'll tell you to spend less:

• Your reach-in pantry works. If the problem is the deep back corners of the shelves and not the space, a set of shelf baskets or an adjustable shelving system inside the existing pantry costs a fraction of cabinetry. Our custom closets page covers the shelving systems that do this well.
• You rent, or expect to move soon. A freestanding pantry cabinet goes with you. A pantry wall stays with the house.
• The kitchen is a standard-size run with square corners. Semi-custom lines make tall pantry cabinets in set widths and heights, rollouts included, and when the opening matches a catalog size, semi-custom gets you most of the result for less.
• You need storage more than you need it to match. Shallow shelving in a basement or laundry room for overflow and bulk buys is honest, cheap storage that doesn't need cabinet doors.

Custom earns its price when the wall isn't a catalog size, the ceiling calls for a height nobody stocks, the pantry has to line up with an existing kitchen, or the interior has to be built around what you actually buy.