Custom pantry shelving for a cupboard that was never going to be tidy

Summary: Custom pantry shelving is mostly a spacing and depth problem. Shallow fixed shelves with clear sightlines usually beat deep pull-outs unless the pantry is genuinely too deep to reach.

The pantry I inherited with this flat was 61.2 cm wide, about 1.9 m tall, and 30.5 cm deep. Inside it: four wire shelves on plastic clips, each one set 28 cm apart, all the way up. Tinned tomatoes fit. Cereal boxes mostly fit. A 2-litre bottle of olive oil did not, so it lived on the counter for four years. Behind the cans, half a metre of dead space nobody could reach. That's what most pantries look like before someone gets serious about them. Then they get serious, type "custom pantry shelving" into Google at half ten on a Tuesday night, and start measuring things they should have measured before they bought the cereal.

The depth problem nobody flags

Standard pantry shelves come in two depths: 30.5 cm (12 inches) and 40.6 cm (16 inches). Both are wrong for most groceries.

A tin of beans is around 7.5 cm tall and 7.5 cm across. A box of pasta is roughly 20 cm long, 7 cm wide, 8 cm tall, give or take a brand. A bag of supermarket flour is closer to 25 cm tall and lumpy. So 30.5 cm of depth gives you four rows of tins, three rows of pasta if you turn them right, and you can't see anything in the back row without a torch. 40.6 cm of depth gives you five rows of tins and a stockpile of forgotten tahini from 2023.

The honest answer for most home pantries is somewhere between 23 and 28 cm, depending on what's actually in there. That's two clear rows of most things, with a sightline to the back. Off-the-shelf shelving doesn't sell that depth. So you either build it, or you live with the third row of beans you've already forgotten about.

I measured the labels on every jar in our cupboard one Sunday afternoon. The tallest non-bottle item was a 28.5 cm tin of San Marzano tomatoes from a deli in Naples, the kind your aunt brings back. Everything else fit under 25 cm. So the pantry didn't need 30.5 cm shelves. It needed about 24 cm shelves with one wider gap for the Naples tin and the olive oil.

Spacing that matches what's on the shelf

The wire-shelf default of 28 cm spacing is a guess. It assumes you're storing cereal boxes. If you're not, you waste vertical space at every level.

Rough breakdown of what goes in a typical pantry:

• Tins and small jars: 9 to 11 cm tall, want 13 cm of clearance to grab them.
• Pasta boxes, crackers, rice bags: 18 to 22 cm, 24 cm of clearance is fine.
• Cereal, flour, sugar, kid snacks: 28 to 33 cm, need 35 cm.
• The weird tall things (olive oil, balsamic, the Naples tin): 35 to 40 cm. One shelf with 42 cm of clearance and you're done.

If you total that up for a 1.9 m tall cupboard, you can fit two tin shelves, two pasta shelves, one cereal shelf, and one tall-bottle shelf, with about 3 cm of overhead for the shelf material itself. Most stock shelving gives you six identical 28 cm gaps, which is two too many in the wrong place and one too few in the right one.

This is why custom pantry shelving is mostly not a craftsmanship question. It's a layout question.

Materials, and what the span actually has to be

For a 61.2 cm wide pantry, span isn't dramatic. 18 mm birch ply will hold groceries across that width with no sag for years. 18 mm MDF is fine but heavier and softer at the edges. White melamine-faced chipboard works but the front edge picks up oil and crumbs in a way ply doesn't.

If your pantry is wider, say 80 cm to 1 m, you start needing either a vertical divider or thicker material. 25 mm ply across 1 m with tinned goods on it is solid for the long haul. 18 mm across the same span will give you a couple of millimetres of dip in the middle inside two years. Not a problem if you don't notice it. A problem if you do.

I'd avoid solid pine for pantry shelving. It cups in dry kitchens, picks up oil stains, and the knots fall out under heavy jar loads. Birch ply with a clear matt finish is the most boring sensible choice, which is usually how it goes.

Pull-outs vs fixed

Pull-out drawers in pantries are seductive and mostly a mistake at home. Cabinet-grade soft-close runners cost 40 to 60 euros a pair. For a six-shelf pantry, that's 240 to 360 euros of hardware before you cut any wood. They also eat 5 to 7 cm of usable width per shelf because the runners need clearance.

Fixed shelves with clear sightlines outperform pull-outs for almost everything except deep corner pantries, where you genuinely can't see the back. If the cupboard is 30.5 cm deep or less, fixed wins. If it's 50 cm or deeper, one pull-out at the bottom is worth it for heavier items like flour, big tins, or whatever gets pulled out the second it can be reached. Above 50 cm depth, the weight on a pull-out shelf gets serious and you want runners rated for 25 kg or more.

For our 30.5 cm cupboard, all fixed. Six shelves at the four spacings above. Total cost in materials, around 90 euros of birch ply and a bag of shelf pins.

Getting it cut without a saw in the kitchen

This is the bit that used to be hard. You'd either drive to a builder's merchant with a list of dimensions and hope they got it right, or you'd buy a sheet, cut it in the garden, and ruin a saw blade on the third pass. Most people gave up at this stage and bought another wire rack.

Sending the dimensions, getting back a labelled stack of pre-cut panels, and putting it together on a Saturday morning is a different experience. Six shelves, four pin holes per shelf, no saw, about ninety minutes including the bit where you measure twice because you don't trust yourself the first time. The olive oil now lives where it belongs. The Naples tin has a home.

If you've been measuring jar heights at half eleven on a school night and wondering whether anyone actually sells 24 cm shelves, that's the gap knuslabs.com was built for.

If you're planning the same kind of project, start with online cabinet maker workflow or compare it with built-in bookcase concepts for alcoves. For adjacent planning detail, read Custom wire shelving for the spaces nobody planned for and Looking for custom bookshelves near you, and what to do if there isn't anyone good.