Designing an Open Pantry

I absolutely adore our kitchen. Except for the pantry situation. The refrigerators must have been waaaay skinner when our house was built because all of the ones that we looked at protruded out in front of the pantry door. Even the counter depth ones!

There was no refrigerator when we bought the house and the old owners had an old rubber accordion door that you can see in our old house photos. We found the regular door that fit the pantry hiding in the basement, so I wasn’t sure why they had taken the normal door down and put this ugly thing up. But once I started shopping for a refrigerator I soon learned that this was the only option.

At first, we purchased this really fancy accordion door from Home Depot.

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But when it arrived in the mail I actually wasn’t all that impressed with it. The “frosted glass” turned out to be super turquoise and it ended up drawing way too much attention. Oh and it was also $180 bucks!

So the one we ultimately ended up with is white with a faux wood design on it, which is at least a little more attractive than the old rubbery one.

So behind our door that drives me totally crazy is this mess.

At least it has these cute little shelves on the side…

But my love for organization and my hatred for the door has gotten me to start thinking about having an open pantry.

I’ve been searching online for weeks to get ideas and I’ve yet to come across anything that is exactly what I have in mind, but I have gotten some pretty good inspiration photos to help me achieve what I want.

I know that I pretty much want everything hidden in baskets or bins. I love the way that these baskets look with the chalkboard labels.

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And check out this beautiful pantry! I love the baskets mixed with the glass containers. And the decorative pitchers add a really nice touch as well.

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And the walls on the back of this one! OH. MY. GOODNESS. I never even thought about doing something like this until I saw this picture.

Even if I didn’t do a design, I could use some more of my beadboard wallpaper like I did for our mudroom and paint it a nice neutral brown or gray. Oh the possibilities!!

I really like the shape of the baskets in this one. And how they used all baskets on one shelf and all jars on another instead of mixing them up. I think it makes it look super clean and tidy.

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And I saved my favorite inspiration photo for last! I’m not sure if it’s the color of the labels or the uniform look of the containers but this is definitely the most aesthetically pleasing food organization I’ve found.

(And you won’t believe how little she spent on this either!)

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I think the biggest struggle with this is going to be finding affordable and durable containers. I’ve already started browsing a little bit for baskets and glass containers and it’s hard to find affordable ones.

I also might try to DIY some like Lauren did this week when she created faux wood crates out of diaper boxes. How genius is that??

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I have about a million and one things on my to-do list, and we’re trying to get on better track financially so I’m not sure when this will actually get done–but stay tuned!

For now my little booger can continue enjoying swinging the door open and close haha. Hopefully once there’s no longer a door he will stop being so interested with taking everything out. Wishful thinking 🙂