How to Make Deep Cabinets Work

At last, I finally managed to organize one area of our home that had been quite unruly for sometime, our “pantry”. Since the kitchen is so small and is lacking proper storage, I had this cabinet built so I can have a storage for our food supplies, unused plates and glasses, baking wares, etc.

Taking pictures in this area of our house is hard because there’s no natural light coming in and it is just not nice to include the DIY paper light shade I did last year. So forgive the low quality pictures. Hehe!

So anyway, the image on the left was taken a few days after the cabinet was built which was about 2 years ago, hence the clutter free (and style-less) look. Being a bad blogger that I am, I, again forgot to take the “before” picture. Even though I bought one more of that big seagrass basket for the canned goods and noodles, you can imagine how messy-looking it got after more than a year of storing our often used items there. It was an eye sore and I hate it especially when our house help randomly places the items in the shelf.

Because the fridge will be placed beside the shelf, I wanted them to be the same depth. 30″ for shelves is too deep. It’s hard to reach the items at the back so I bought baskets. The downside of it, though, is that the baskets aren’t deep enough so I wasn’t maximizing the full storage capacity of the shelf. The solution: install shallow drawers.

The shelf is now divided into nine cubbyholes minimize the clutter. I don’t want to just install cabinet doors because I still want to display stuff there so I had the three middle ones left open. The top two with doors don’t have drawers since it would be too high to reach the back part anyway. I have my extra dishes, serving trays and salad spinner stored in there.

For the lower doors, “tray-drawers” were installed to accommodate tall containers such as milk and cereals.

Since the middle part is still too deep for displays, I had stoppers glued in the middle. The I cut a foam board to fit the opening and painted it yellow, the same color as our dining wall. That way, I can use the back part as “secret” storage for other stuff not exactly worth displaying or used rarely like alcohol, old recipe magazines, product boxes, etc. Now, every inch of the shelf is fully utilized!

Now, I have to organize the rest of the house!