If you do not have a pantry near your kitchen, you may have room for a pantry cabinet. This is a standalone cabinet, usually with two narrow doors enclosing the interior. Sometimes the upper part of each door is glazed to allow the contents to be seen. The interior should be dark and dry, suitable for spices, tea, coffee and other foods that are best preserved by the exclusion of light. The top of the cabinet is a good place display some of your favorite vases or a napkin holder for easy access.
Inside the cabinet, shelves are about twelve inches apart, allowing you to store food items or kitchen dishes. Pots and pans can also be stored in this cabinet, although the kitchen storage cabinet will dictate the largest ones that can possibly be stored in it. A pantry cabinet can all be used to store cook books, canisters and boxed food like cereal or cookies. You can also store small appliances, or remove one of the adjustable shelves and use it to house the microwave. If the back of the kitchen pantry cabinet is wood and there is sufficient room around the microwave, you may be able to operate it within the cabinet as well. However, you should read the venting requirements for the oven before trying this. A small hole in the back of the cabinet and the wall socket on the wall where the pantry cabinet is placed will provide power for the microwave.
Some cabinets come with lazy susans on some shelves to allow access to the contents of the shelves, and some cabinets enclose a central lazy susan the entire height of the cabinet for easy access. There are also pantry cabinets with shelves that slide out for access to the items in the back. Like all cabinets, it is the ability to get to the items at the back or the bottom of the stack that makes it useful or not. Pantry cabinets are usually not very deep for this reason, and so they do not take up too much floor space or protrude too far into the room
Most pantry cabinets are made from wood, but there are cabinets made from metal. The design of a pantry cabinet varies, so look for the arrangement of shelves, etc., that works best for you. You will need to start your hunt with the dimensions of the space where you intend to place the pantry cabinet, so you do not experience the disappointment of setting your heart on a particular cabinet and have it not fit where you want to put it. (The old measure twice, cut once rule applies here, even though you are not cutting anything.)
There is no reason why a pantry cabinet cannot be placed in any other room that need storage, like the family room or a bedroom. These cabinets are usually small that the armoire frequently prescribed for this purpose, and with the new thin TVs, the requirement for a large hiding place is not needed. If you are looking for storage in the TV room and the TV hangs on the wall, get a piece of furniture that does not make the room seem smaller, like an armoire, and get a pantry cabinet instead.
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