39" is my width. 24" would be OK so long as you can maneuver to reach the lowest shelves. You will not be able to crouch down facing the lower side shelves.

I have a door which I am considering framing with pantry cabinets, so I have been thinking about it. Open shelves you could go 2 foot if the rest of your house has that limit. I'm likely to go 4 foot, but I need room for pullouts and door swings and such.

Both of you have an excellent points. Yes, I would only be doing open shelving, no pull outs or cabinets. I will have to attempt crouching in my doorways to see if that is going to be a serious issue. I'm planning to do shelving that I could remove or could be removed if I ever sell the house in case I don't like the layout. The space will be longer than 24", so I suppose if necessary I can always crouch the long way. Or maybe it will make sense to simply do deeper cabinets at the end of the pantry and no cabinets on the side so that my walk way can be of a more reasonable width.

24" doorways are one thing, 24" aisles are a different matter. With a doorway, you're through it in a step, with an aisle or walkway, you have to have room to maneuver as well as take things off shelves & carry them out. I have a basement pantry that has a 33.5" wide aisle...it's just wide enough, I would not want it any narrower.

Our MBR closet has a 24" wide aisle, and it's too narrow...maneuvering in it is not the easiest...we're always brushing the clothes when we enter/exit. Clothes, at least are soft and "give way", hard shelves, OTOH do not.

No, it's not an exact comparison, but based on my MBR and basement pantry experiences, I think you should have at least a 32" aisle, more if you can swing it.

That's really great information, thanks buehl. Sounds like if I do consider going to 24", I need to mock it up (maybe cardboard "shelves") to see if I can actually function in the space before committing. And maybe I will just have to accept the fact that I can't have shelves along the wall that would narrow the walk area. I'll just have to do extra deep shelves at the back. Thanks!

How wide is the space? What else is going in it? If you have 12" shelves on both sides, you would only need a space 12" + 33" + 12" = 57" wide.

Extra deep shelves in a pantry aren't a good idea unless you install pullouts on them. Pantry shelves deeper than 15" end up being "black holes" as far as finding things is concerned. Our old dysfunctional pantry had 18" deep shelves and things were always getting lost in the back! When we demo'd the pantry, we found things that had expired years ago! They had gotten lost in the back and I didn't know they were there. My new pantry has 12" deep shelves along the longer span and 15" deep shelves along the shorter span. I had originally planned to put a small MW on one of the 15" shelves, but when I tried it out, I couldn't open the door of the MW all the way! (I have a "corner pantry" so the adjacent wall was a diagonal.) Now, I store cereal, my Cuisinart + attachments, my old knife block w/seldom-used knives, extra cookbooks (behind the knife block), bins for potatoes, and few other assorted items. Other than the potato bins, the 15" deep shelves are really a bit too deep.

The space is fairly small: 35" x 72". It is a separate room a little distance from the kitchen with a door on one end of the length. We currently have no pantry, so anything will be an improvement.

At least initially I will not be having a cabinet maker build anything in there. I will just find some shelving or build some myself. In time I will have a professional build out the pantry shelving. We're doing this area first, and then moving on to the kitchen. On the outside we will be building a 70" long wet bar that will help serve as a temporary kitchen when we're ready to remodel the kitchen. The wet bar will have a sink, wine fridge, and some cabinets below (with a few drawers and a few shelves). Above will be more cabinets (maybe glass fronts).

My main goal for the pantry space is food storage. Specifically storage of canned goods, jar goods, boxed goods (cereal, grains), bulk grains and seeds and beans and nuts (not certain on what containers yet), maybe onions and potatoes and squash, and definitely dog food (both canned and dry). I will have a place in the kitchen for a microwave. I may store extra kitchen linens in this area as well. I hadn't even thought of storing extra cookbooks in the space, but that's a great idea too. At this time I do not have any fancy kitchen appliances like a food processor or mixer, so I haven't really thought about where I would store them if I ever purchase them.

Thank you again for contributing your experience and knowledge. GW is an amazing resource.

A couple to consider:

The first one gives you work space in the pantry, the second gives you more storage.

Wow! Buehl that's fantastic! I never even thought to use the space between the studs. I really like that second one. The door already swings open, so that should work really well. Thank you so very much for taking the time to draw that out. What program did you use? I just downloaded Google Sketchup to give that a try for putting together some layouts.

I have a tiny bit bigger space. I like buehl's 2nd too. Not sure about 15" d though. I like 12 or less since things get lost back there... Do you have to store things like brooms and vacuums there too? Then maybe you save a corner for that. Really great idea about the stud space! Canned goods there would be really cool! I think you could make those 6" be maybe even 9" too. My door opens in and i really only have 24" free space when I am in mine and it's not an issue. The bottom things though are the long rectangular baskets from Ikea that i just pull out and look into, kinda like one would a drawer so no getting down there and staring ;)

I use Microsoft PowerPoint...I just downloaded free graph paper, put it on a slide and draw boxes, etc. for the layouts.

In this case, I used 1 square = 3". With kitchen layouts, I usually use 1 square = 6".