My Number One Suggestion for Home Design:

A Food and Dry Goods Pantry

When I returned home today from a trip to the local Target, I brought in the food stuffs and paper good supplies like jars of spaghetti sauce and packages of tissue boxes and diapers and began planning my trip to the various places in the house where each needed to go. Initially, I set them down in the entryway until I could deliver. My mind began to whirr. Over the years, I have found greater and greater value in a planned place for all the necessary items in the home. This starts with the kitchen but extends to bathroom and laundry supplies as well. Our home manages these for a small family but was not constructed with the thought of a growing one.

The perfect solution lies in forming your plan during the development stage of a home building project. This is where the most flexibility can be found and the advice of experts is best suited for implementation. However, not everyone is financially capable to tackle an idea like this one and the level of time investment required for the many details that must be considered can prove daunting. A solution can still be reached with thoughtful design and creative use of space.

In the early stages of designing your new home, using the technique of observing and journaling the living patterns of your family and potential future family needs i.e. babies or grandparents, will greatly focus what elements your home will need and where those will be best put to use.

Should your home have two master suites on the first level or should a second visitor suite be built in the walk-out basement? Where should a half bath be positioned for guest access and comfort? Will you even permit guests in your home? Some may not desire to share their home with anyone outside their immediate family. To them the location of that half bath may not matter to the same degree that it would for those seeing friends of their children frequently. With these ideas in mind, I propose one of the greatest but least considered elements of a new home is a dry good and food storage pantry.

In many home designs, a pantry is a small closet that opens directly into the kitchen or the hallway between the kitchen and other spaces such as a laundry. Some are slightly longer and are walk-in capable or have windows (although windows invite solar deterioration of food stuffs which should also be considered when designing the storage furniture). They might have shelving or cabinets from floor to ceiling or they might be designed as a small room having cabinets on the bottom and top with a countertop for additional storage options. They can be highly detailed with spice or canned good racks, walls of pull out drawers, hooks for cleaning tools, or a virtual feast of elements. It truly depends to what degree you spend planning the things you need to store or wish to keep on hand, the frequency with which these items are used, and the proximity to the kitchen you desire them to be. The more attention you spend on this room of your home, the greater the amount of peace that will ensue due to your careful planning and advance organization. The patterns of your home will flow to such a degree that you will not experience overflowing kitchens and lack of necessary cooking and potentially cleaning supplies. My personal design ideal is to have a full walk-in food pantry near to the kitchen as well as a separate closet in the laundry of my home for cleaning supplies. When the Wanderers’ next home is designed and built these will be at the top of the list of important pieces of our home.

Carefully observing the lifestyle patterns of your family and the regular choices that are made to provide solutions for the family’s needs cannot be overstated.

Case in point, does your family suffer from modest or severe allergies? Will you need a tissue box for each room of your home? Let’s imagine you have two children and your home is a three bedroom, two-bathroom ranch style house as is common to many Americans. Those two questions alone can influence your dry goods storage plan. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, and kitchen may all require a box of tissue if your family has severe allergies. Seven boxes. Typically, these are purchased in packages of three or four. Now consider, how fast are they depleted? When will they need to be re-supplied? Where do you shop and how often? Do you purchase supplies ahead on sale or by bulk? Or do you buy only what the family needs when it is needed? Do you budget this supply?

Say you like to plan ahead as this is a medical issue and considered a must-have item in your home. You have trained your children to successfully use tissue as necessary and half the boxes are empty within a month. Where are the replacements kept? My suggestion is in a dry goods pantry. While this could be a separate closet in your home, which ultimately is my preference, it does not have to be. Space can be ferreted out in a laundry room or a linen closet. Perhaps a designated cabinet in the garage is where you keep your supply. These differing ideas can help you determine the use of precious space in your home but they must be considered ahead to help make your home work successfully for you and keep a peaceful flow.

Have you ever been on your way to an appointment or trip to the store and every traffic light along your path turns green at the right time so that you never need to stop before reaching your destination? That is what it feels like to have peaceful flow. How about when you are “taking advantage of the facilities” and the tissue runs out, yielding a moment of panic? However, if you are at home, for example, and you know that you have a ready supply in the cabinet next to you, there is no hesitation or distress, maybe slight annoyance but there it is again, peaceful flow. That is a win for thoughtful design and planning. An ease with which a potential problematic annoyance is easily resolved by careful forethought. You are then able to go about your day without concern over a minor bump so easily sidestepped by a dry goods pantry stocked for that purpose and supplies positioned well for use.

Let’s visit another common scenario. You are a coffee junkie and must drink at least one cup of this libation before meeting with the world (or your family for that matter. Wink. Wink!). You reach for your stash by the coffee maker when you suddenly remember that you had been meaning to buy a resupply of your favorite brand all week and now the very minute of crisis is upon you. There is no more coffee in the house! Oh wait, Super Dad to the rescue. It occurs to you that last summer, Dad convinced Mom to agree to a small remodel and the laundry closet was turned into a food and dry goods pantry with a relocation of the washer and dryer to the garage. A promise to remodel the garage for greater ease of use was part of the agreement reached, I might add, and Dad is hard at work on that now. You stumble across the kitchen and move the folding door to reveal a fresh bag waiting for you on the shelf at eye level. What a relief! Crisis averted. Peaceful flow uninterrupted. No time wasted or unnecessary emotion spent on a simple fix supplied by careful design.

In the last paragraph, the design element was larger still than many can do or afford. Not to worry. Pick a location in one of your kitchen cabinets to devote solely to stocking a supply of frequently or heavily used items such as sugar, salt, cooking spices, or sauce packets. I suggest that you also use a bottom cabinet for heavier or bulkier items such as a tray of canned goods or backup package of napkins. Maybe those infrequently used small appliances can fit in a bottom cabinet rather than on your counters. You might be able to store that wonderful “Magic Bullet” blender or small hand mixer alongside your grilling utensils in a plastic tote on the shelf inside that bottom cabinet rather than in one of your utensil drawers. If you store the tote on its lid, it will slide easily forward allowing you to obtain the necessary tools once the door is opened. Simple steps like these will bring peaceful flow in your kitchen by providing those necessary backup supplies at the moment they are needed in a location that meets your needs.

“The central theme behind thoughtful design

is using a purposeful and specific plan

to achieve a greater joy and calmer environment inside our homes. “

When you came across this subject you may not have considered this to be the end result. Design in any application is used for bringing useful change. As you desire your home to be that retreat from the outside world and to function well, thoughtful design provides a methodical way to help bring about your family’s peaceful flow. 

That’s one step further down the road,

Jack