Hi all,

I'm redoing the kitchen, and have to decide what to do for a pantry. My current situation is that I have a tiny (20" wide) closet pantry in the kitchen that we are ripping out to have our double ovens moved into the space. The current pantry has 18" wire, fixed shelves.

I currently have a small walk-in pantry at the bottom of the basement steps right off the kitchen. This pantry has wire Elfa shelves, and is used for overflow of pantry items, as well as large cooking items like our roasting pan, wok, crock pot, etc., and bulk items like paper towels and such. We use the kitchen pantry for more daily things like cereal, oatmeal, flour, snacks, etc.

My 2 options for a pantry in the new layout are:

1) between the refrigerator and the doorway to the dining room. I don't want a solid 24" deep pantry here though because it cuts down on the visual openness into the dining room (if that makes sense). I'm thinking instead of a 24" deep base cab with roll-out shelves, with (maybe) a wall-cab depth (13 or 15" deep) appliance garage on top, and then just shelves behind 2 doors. This space is 27" wide and would go up 8.5 feet. I estimate this would be far superior to what we currently have. But it's not a traditional "pantry."

or

2) next to our sliding glass door, 18" deep, 21" wide, only as tall as the top of the sliding glass door so that the doors can open and not hit the drapery rod. This would be more like a traditional cabinet pantry.

My concern is that for resale, option (1) might be seen as a kitchen with no real pantry. Option (2) gives a real pantry, but it's smaller, and I would bet the total usable area is LESS than with (1). I somewhat prefer (1), but am worried that it's dumb to create a kitchen without a real pantry (walk-in or closet or pull-out). Please remember we DO have a real walk-in pantry in the basement, which we find very useful. None of the houses in our neighborhood have real walk-in pantries (unless their owners added them later). We don't have room for a real one in/near the kitchen (other than the one in the basement).

So, what are your opinions? Are we making a mistake not having a typical "pantry?" We plan to stay in this house 20-25 more years, so maybe we shouldn't even worry about resale, but it's a thought.

Opinions???

Thanks!!

Piglet