Kitchen Pantry Designs
Create, remodel, organize and use your pantry
The Best 7 Small Kitchen Remodeling Improvements
If you’ve got a small kitchen, like I do, and you’re thinking about remodeling, there are some things you can do which give you a better “bang for the buck” than others. These projects can make your kitchen work better, feel more spacious, and look better into the bargain.
- Paint – the walls, ceiling, cabinets, even the floor! Paint is the quickets and often the cheapest remodeling project you can do, and can make a huge difference to how spacious and how welcoming the room feels. If you have open or glass-fronted cabinets, the interior color makes a surprising difference too, so consider painting the insides.
- New counters are more expensive than paint but also make an amazing difference. If you have old laminate counters which are in good shape (no laminate coming unglued from the substrate) and which have square edges, not the curved “post-formed” front and back edges, you can glue new laminate right over the top. Other economical counter upgrades include new laminate counters (custom edges and realistic-looking laminate patterns make these better looking than the old type), tiling (even over top of laminate), and butcher block coated with a hard-wearing finish. Replacing old counters with an expensive option like stone or solid surfacing requires you to think hard about whether you plan to upgrade the rest of the kitchen to match, and whether that later upgrade will allow you to re-use the new counters.
- Replacing appliances can be simple if yours are all standalone and standard sizes. You can easily replace a standalone fridge and range with new trendy appliances. A dishwaster is a little more awkward, although the sizes are fairly standard and you might even be able to get a new front panel for your existing dishwasher to match other new appliances, instead of completely replacing it. The most difficulty arises when you have older built-in appliances like ovens and cooktoips where the sizes of the newer models are different and would require modification of your cabinets.
- Flooring – if your flooring is worn before its time but the rest of the kitchen is still OK, a new vinyl tile, sheet finyl or laminate floor is an easy fix which will make a big impact, given the size of the visible floor. Floating laminate floors are especially useful to cover surfaces which are not completely smooth, like tiles.
- Cabinets – now we’re getting into serious investment territory. Replacing cabinets can be the most expensive improvement you can make to a kitchen, although less so in a small kitchen. Simple repainting may work if your cabinets are still in good shape, or refacing which requires rather more work and considerably more expense, or even replacing teh doors and drawer fronts while keeping the old cabinet boxes. All these options assume that the old cabinets are in good shape structurally to make the work worthwhile.
- A new backsplash may not be your first thought for a remodeling project, but it can completely change the look of your kitchen and can improve the function too. Subway tile, mosaics, and glass or stone materials are “in” at the moment and can all give you a good-looking and mess-proof backsplash, although mosiacis leave you with a lot of grout lines to clean. Even better, replacing a backsplash creates much less mess and upheaval than most other small kitchen remodeling projects.
Backsplash storage is another good idea: narrow shelves, hanging rails and grids, or storage accessories which hang under the upper cabinets can all make good use of the easy-to-reach backsplash area. - A pantry in a small kitchen? Yes! Some older houses may already have a step-in or walk-in pantry combined with a small kitchen, and optimising the pantry space can make the kitchen itself work and look better. Squeezing a pantry (separate, or a pull-out in a cabinet) into an existing small kitchen can feel like a juggling act but because pantry space is usually extremely well-packed storage, if you can find the space for a pantry it will help free space in the rest of the kitchen.
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How Pantry Designs Can Improve Your Small Kitchen Remodel
A pantry can help with your small kitchen remodel even though you may think pantries are only for people with lots of space. How can this be?
Well, there are several ways this can happen:
- A pantry saves on the need for cabinets in the main kitchen, so you don’t have to squeeze as many in. It’s also much cheaper storage space than cabinets if you can use a walk-in (or even just step-in) pantry with open shelving.
- It allows you to use space which is not quite within the kitchen proper (because your pantry items are things you don’t use every day, so it’s OK if you have to take a few steps to get there). That means you can steal space from other rooms to make a pantry.
- A pantry cabinet, such as the fold-out, swing-out or pull-out models available from cabinetry companies, squeezes the most storage possible into the smallest square-footage of floor space, making all shelves accessible right to the very back without having to crawl on the floor to get to the back of a base cabinet. If you have a pantry cabinet which stretches right to the ceiling you may well need a small ladder or a step stool to reach the very top pullouts, but it’s still easier than reaching to the back of a deep cabinet. The shelves in pullouts are also height-adjustable, so you can set them to match their contents and squeeze in as many shelves vertically as possible.
- Pantry pull-out type cabinets are available even for small spaces, as small as 3″ wide from some companies, so you can use them to make use of every inch in your small kitchen.
- Having most of your food in one place instead of scattered around the cabinets not only makes it easy to find things (because there are fewer places to look) it also frees up space in the other cabinets for the utensils and equipment you use frequently.
- You can store seldom-used china and equipment in the pantry as well as food, keeping it out of the main kitchen and reducing clutter.
More Counter Space!
A pantry can also help maximise counter space in a small kitchen, in several ways.
- If you have a walk-in pantry outside the kitchen, there’s less need for tall cabinets in the kitchen itself and so more potential counter space.
- If you have room in a pantry to store small appliances, or if you can store them in cabinets because your food is now in the pantry, it frees up counter space.
- If you have cabinet pantries, although the most common ones are full height you can also get them as base cabinets and wall cabinets, so you can still have counter space between them.
As well as saving on cabinet space and free-ing up counter space, a pantry can save aggravation too – if the pantry is at one end of the kitchen and snacks are stored there, it minimises multiple people wandering through the kitchen as kids and spouses can get what they need without entering the work core.
So, when you’re planning a small kitchen remodel, make sure you include pantry designs in your thinking.