Our Pantry Is Finally Usable (Even If It Isn’t Finished)

The pantry has reached the stage of a renovation I like best: it is not finished, but it has stopped being theoretical.

There are still tiles to do. There is trim. The floor needs finishing. The wooden gallery rails need going onto the shallow shelves. There are several details I can stare at for long enough to invent another job.

But the food has moved in, which means I no longer care whether the room has officially graduated from Building Project.

It is a pantry now.

This is not an aspirational pantry

I do love the beautiful rows of matching jars. I am exactly the sort of person who will decant something purely because I prefer looking at it through glass. But I also need somewhere for an open bag of crisps, twelve tins of tomatoes, noodles, half a packet of something and whatever Andy has bought that does not fit any category known to man.

If a pantry only works when every lentil is decanted and every label faces forward, it is not going to survive contact with us.

So the pretty bits have to do a job. Dry goods go into jars where that genuinely makes them easier to see and use. Drawers take packets and tins. Baskets hide the awkward stuff. The top shelf can hold things we need but do not need every five minutes.

The shelves were designed around what we actually keep

This sounds obvious, but I have lived with enough storage designed around imaginary possessions to know that it apparently is not.

The shelves are about 30cm deep, with the counter at roughly 60cm. There asre spice racks on both doors. The bottom row is deeper because I want it to take the larger 500ml jars, while the rows above can deal with smaller jars. Andy hand made them, and they are amazing.

There is also a self-imposed rule of no more than about twelve jars of any one variety. This is less a minimalist principle and more an attempt to prevent me from accidentally opening a small preserving wholesaler.

The point is visibility. I want to know what we have. I want to reach for rice without excavating. I want preserving jars to have somewhere to return to. I want to stop buying something because I cannot see the three packets already hiding behind something else.

It has already changed how the kitchen works

This is the bit I could not really judge from drawings. Once the food moved in, the pantry immediately began earning its square footage.

The kitchen cupboards can concentrate on kitchen things instead of trying to be a larder as well. Bulkier dry goods have a home. Preserving supplies are close to where I use them. I can stand in one place and see the bones of several dinners instead of opening six cupboards like a contestant on a particularly boring game show.

It also makes the garden-to-kitchen bit of our life make more sense. Food comes in from outside, some gets eaten immediately, some gets dried, frozen or preserved, and all of that needs storage. The pantry is not decorative overflow. It is part of the system.

Of course I am still making it pretty

Useful does not mean I want it ugly. The gallery rails are wooden for now because the brass ones I wanted were about £120, which is frankly obscene for a bit of rail. The current plan is Rub 'n Buff and patience. Proper brass can wait until it stops feeling like I am buying jewellery for a shelf.

The tiles are part of it too. So are the jars and labels and all the tiny finishing decisions that make a working room feel considered rather than merely stuffed.

That balance is basically the whole A Little Plenty thing for me. I want the useful object. I also want the useful object to make me happy when I walk past it.

Finished is overrated

I have a tendency to postpone enjoying things until they are complete. This room is curing me of that.

The pantry is already doing exactly what I wanted while still having a visible to-do list. I can use it now. I can change it after living with it. In fact, I would rather discover that a shelf wants moving before I have declared the entire thing sacred and finished.

There will eventually be a prettier after photograph. The rails will be on, the tiles done, the floor sorted and I will undoubtedly remove three ugly packets from view before taking the picture.

But this stage matters too. The drawers are full. The jars are in. Dinner lives here. That counts.