Our Wonderful Fruit Cellar Pantry

When our house was originally built in 1920, the basement had a section built out with masonry to be the home's fruit cellar. Today we use the original fruit cellar as our pantry. It is a wonderful and charming space featuring some of the field stone foundation on two sides and the NATCO hollow tile brick on two sides. Some of the wood shelves appear to be original, but are warping quite badly and will need to be upgraded at some point. In the meantime, we have been adding shelving gradually to expand our usable space. As promised, here are some photos for everyone to see.

When you first open the door to the pantry, you see my baker's rack, full of dried beans, canning and pickling seasonings, soup stock flavorings and commercially canned produce and soups. The upper wooden shelves we believe to be original to the house and hold our dry soup mixes (in the white box) and some more canned foods - mostly tomato products and canned meats.

Panning to the right, we added one of those nine-box storage shelves. Originally it was in the boys' room and held the cardboard organizing boxes. Those boxes did not last long and were destroyed before we even moved into the house. It was shuffled around to various rooms until we finally moved it into the pantry. This cubicle storage unit primarily hold baking supplies, such as brown sugar, cornbread boxes, bread crumbs, syrups, rice, powdered milk and instant potatoes. The top also hold some additional baking supplies as well as goodies for the baby.

This is a picture of the inside corner of the pantry space. We installed one of those metal, five-shelved units that you can pick up for about $20.00 at Wal-mart. For the most part, this shelving unit hold all the vegetables that we canned, dill pickles, spaghetti sauce and tomato soup. We have found that these shelves provide a good amount of storage at a reasonable cost and can be gradually added.
  

 This section of the pantry is where we store our commercially packaged condiments and the three types of flours that I like to stock. We are investigating a better, long-term storage option for the flours, but for now, we are keeping them in their original packaging.

 

The next section of shelving holds our paper products, juice, sugar, chips and water. The shelving space here is a bit awkward. Eventually, we hope to add more of the shelving units to better utilize the space, but still maintain the uppermost original shelf.

Swinging around and we have two more of those wonderful shelves. These are full of home canned goods. The first one holds mostly fruits, in the form of jams, butters and syrups. The second shelf is a mixture of both fruits and vegetables. This is where the overflow of pickles, spaghetti sauce, tomato soup and more is stored.

Finally, we are back around and to the doorway again. We keep crates at the bottom to hold our onions and potatoes and use the window ledge to hold health and beauty products.

So this is our little pantry. I hope you enjoyed the pictures and that it has given you some ideas for your home.