If you are anything like me, I am a minimalist where everything in our house has its place. However this does not always hold true when it comes to storage areas. In fact a common problem that several homeowners have is the lack of organization in closets and the pantry due to the minimal shelving provided when the home was built. Pantries and closets are increasingly being overhauled by homeowners in order to keep these storage areas cleaner and clutter free. Let’s be honest, you can never have enough storage space and most often the size of the closet and pantry is an issue. So how do you optimize these spaces for storage capacity while still maintaining functionality and adequate access for everything? Below, we have shared some of our favourite pantry organization and space-saving solutions.
Custom Shelving & Racks for the Kitchen
Storage racks that you can find at most box stores allow for another level of organizing, including racks for hanging pots, moveable islands, and standalone shelving units that you can place against a kitchen or dining room wall. Any of these options can help retrofit your existing kitchen cabinetry storage by relocating items to other areas of the kitchen. Here’s the problem – what do you do if you don’t have that extra floor space, and what if the store product dimensions don’t work with the dimensions you need? This is where custom wall mounted shelving is a space saving solution. Design trends for the kitchen have become more ‘showy’ in recent years and often designers will incorporate areas of the cabinetry for open shelving, and utilize areas of useable wall space for additional floating shelves to bring an element of ‘home comfort’ in the design palette. This especially holds true for kitchens that are smaller and storage is a plight of the Client. Open shelving may showcase everyday kitchen items that are sleek in style and add accent colour to the overall kitchen scheme to bring it all together, all while the underlying purpose is storage. Whether it’s country charm, rustic ambiance, mountain getaway, or metro city, this trending flare makes the home ‘feel’ like home while increasing the usable storage space you need.
Pantry Custom Shelving and wall unit
For those who have a pantry, the general commonality is wire shelving and in reality there never seem to be enough shelves, am I right? Let’s take this one step further. How many of you have all your spices, sauce mixes, marinades, and misc. small baking items stored on those same pantry shelves that everything else is stored on? You know, the items that get buried behind other stuff, things you don’t even know you have, and those items that always get knocked over when you reach for something else. Yes? Then lets look at your pantry and ask yourself if you have any open wall space. If the answer to that is also yes, then a custom built-in wall unit with several rows of open shelving for your spices is the answer you’re looking for. It is basically a spice rack on steroids, one that multitasks, and is only approx. 4” in depth. With a customized width, height, and depth to suit your own pantry size and available wall space, this allows you to maximize your storage use, and it won’t take away from the accessibility where space is already limited. Prism Interiors has built and installed many of these customized spice racks for our Clients and with Christmas around the corner, this could be the perfect gift for the female of the house.
Change your closet shelving
Like the pantry, all closets throughout the home, with perhaps the exception of the master closet, suffer the same fate with a lack of adequate shelving and overall functionality. In particular, it is the closets in the kids’ rooms where the most usability is needed and yet it fails miserably in this area. You can change that by adding MDF painted built-in shelves in the middle of the closet, and 2 closet rods in staggered heights on either side of the shelving creating 4 new areas to hang clothes – 2 up and 2 down. The bottom height of the closet rods should be approx. 42” which is the perfect height for your kids to grab their own clothes to get dressed in the morning, and alternatively, great for kids to help with laundry by hanging up their clean clothes too! Prism Interiors offers solutions perfectly fitted to the unique dimensions and client preferences of the space. Give us a call and let us help you transform your closets!
Considering a kitchen renovation or kitchen upgrade in Calgary? Prism Interiors specializes in a wide variety of home renovations and design projects, providing solutions that improve both the aesthetics and function of your home. Contact Prism Interiors for a free consultation and estimate today!