Serving Phoenix and the Entire Valley
Free In-Home Design Consultation: (602) 298-6956
Space Solutions designs and installs custom pantry organization for homeowners across the City of Mesa, the third-largest city in Arizona. Walk-in pantries, reach-in retrofits, pull-out trays, adjustable shelving, and the specialty inserts for spices, wine, cans, and countertop appliances. We build the pantry around the way your household shops and cooks today. Not the way a draftsman guessed it would in 1984.
Mesa does not have one pantry problem. It has three, sorted by where in the city you live. Central and west Mesa, the original townsite and the first post-war subdivisions, holds roughly 24,000 homes built before 1970, and a large share of those kitchens have no pantry at all. East Mesa is 1970s through 1990s territory, where the 1980s alone produced more than 51,000 homes, almost every one with a narrow galley pantry behind a hollow door. Southeast Mesa, Eastmark and the neighborhoods near Gateway, is newer, and the pantry there usually has the footprint but nothing worth keeping inside.
Which era is your house? That question decides the whole design, and it is the first thing our designer asks when they walk into a Mesa kitchen.
Serving
every part of Mesa.
From Downtown Mesa and Lehi to Dobson Ranch, Dreamland Villa, Leisure World, Alta Mesa, Red Mountain Ranch, Las
Sendas, Superstition Springs, and Eastmark. Family owned since 1991 by Noah and Jennifer Peery. 45,000+ Arizona
homes served.
Mesa homeowners upgrade the pantry because the original one was sized for a household that shopped once a week in small quantities, and nobody in Mesa shops that way anymore. A pantry you can see into and reach into stops food from expiring at the back, ends the overflow pile on the counter, and makes a kitchen that may have been remodeled twice finally work as a whole.
Think about who is actually using these kitchens. Mesa is a middle-income city, median household income around $82,752, with roughly 198,000 households and about 64 percent of them owner-occupied. Long-tenured homeowners with real equity who stock up at the warehouse club because it is cheaper. A 24-pack of water, a 25-pound bag of rice, a case of canned tomatoes. The 1980s galley pantry was never drawn for that. It holds a week of groceries and the garage floor takes the rest.
Bigger households make the math worse. When grandparents move into the casita and the grown kids are back in their old room, the grocery run doubles and the pantry does not. Three generations cooking in a kitchen planned for a family of four in 1986. We design a lot of east Mesa pantries for exactly that.
Then there is the Mesa-only version. The seasonal homeowner. East Mesa has the largest concentration of RV resorts in the Phoenix area and a row of 55+ communities beside them, and many of those site-built homes sit closed from June through October. A pantry in that house has a different job. It holds what is left behind in sealed containers, behind doors, through a summer of monsoon dust with nobody home to wipe a shelf. Then it restocks in an afternoon when the owners come back in November.
The climate argument cuts both ways here. Outside the monsoon window, which officially runs June 15 to September 30, Mesa air is genuinely dry, close to ideal for long-term dry goods. Flour, rice, beans, pasta, and whole spices hold quality longer here than anywhere humid. Inside that window, haboobs push fine dust into every room. Open shelving looks great on a Pinterest board. In Mesa in August it collects a gray film. Doored cabinetry wins, twice over in a house nobody is home to clean.
Walk-in pantries hold the most and let you see everything at once. Reach-in pantries fit where a walk-in never will and win on storage per square foot. In Mesa the decade the house was built usually makes the call, because the footprint you have is the footprint the original plan gave you, and moving a wall is a different project.
Southeast Mesa, Eastmark and the subdivisions around ASU Polytechnic and Phoenix-Mesa Gateway, is where we see the walk-in footprint most often. The builder delivered it with four wire shelves, three feet of empty air above the top one, two dead corners, and a floor that becomes a bulk-storage graveyard within a month. Straightforward rebuilds. Floor-to-ceiling adjustable shelving on both walls, pull-out trays at waist height, a lazy susan in each corner, and an open zone tall enough for the stand mixer and the air fryer.
East Mesa, 1970 through 1999, is the volume job in this city, and it is nearly always a reach-in. Dobson Ranch, Alta Mesa, Superstition Springs, Red Mountain Ranch, the early phases of Las Sendas. Typically 24 to 36 inches wide and a full 24 inches deep, with three or four fixed shelves. Depth is the problem. A 24-inch fixed shelf is where cans go to be forgotten. We swap them for full-extension pull-out trays, add door-mounted rails for spices and packets, and carry the shelving up to the ceiling the original carpenter stopped two feet short of.
Central and west Mesa is the third story, and it is one most East Valley cities do not have. Dreamland Villa, which broke ground in 1958, and the 1950s and 1960s ranch blocks that spread out from the historic districts downtown were built when the pantry was not a standard kitchen feature. A run of upper cabinets, a broom closet if you are lucky, and that is it. In those houses we are not remodeling a pantry. We are creating one. A hall closet, a coat closet, a blank wall in the breakfast nook, or a freestanding pantry cabinet built to look original to the room. Within about 15 feet of the stove, it works.
Pre-1970 central or west Mesa ranch home, Dreamland Villa block home, or a Downtown Mesa bungalow. No pantry, or a single shallow closet. Solution: convert a hall or coat closet into a purpose-built pantry, or add a furniture-grade pantry cabinet that reads as original to the kitchen.
1970s to 1990s east Mesa home in Dobson Ranch, Alta Mesa, Superstition Springs, or Red Mountain Ranch. Narrow galley pantry, fixed 24-inch shelves, sized for a different era of grocery shopping. Solution: full-height pull-out trays, door-mounted spice rails, adjustable shelving carried into the unused top zone.
Post-2000 Eastmark or southeast Mesa build near Gateway. Walk-in footprint, four wire shelves, dead corners, empty ceiling zone. Solution: floor-to-ceiling adjustable shelving on both walls, waist-height pull-outs, lazy susan corners, LED lighting.
Leisure World, Sunland Village, or Dreamland Villa single-level home, full-time or seasonal. Reach and lock-up matter more than volume. Solution: everyday goods between knee and shoulder height, drawers instead of high shelves, sealed doored cabinetry that closes clean for the summer.
Pull-out shelving is the single highest-impact pantry upgrade we install, because it turns a deep, dark shelf into a tray that slides fully clear of the cabinet on ball-bearing rails. The case of soup at the back comes to you. Nobody kneels on the tile with a phone flashlight. In the 1980s reach-in pantries that make up so much of east Mesa, this one change recovers more usable storage than adding a shelf ever could.
Most of our pantry pull-outs are rated for 75 to 100 pounds, which carries a 24-pack of bottled water or a 25-pound bag of flour without flexing. That rating matters in a city where households buy in bulk and stock up before monsoon season. We build full-extension trays where the whole shelf clears the opening, three-quarter extension for lighter everyday goods, and heights matched to what you keep: tall for cereal and pasta, short and closely spaced for cans and jars, wide and shallow for sheet pans on edge.
For the seasonal homeowner, pull-outs do something else. They make the fall restock fast. Slide out, load, slide in, done. And in April, a tray that comes all the way out is a tray you can empty and wipe in a minute instead of reaching blind into a corner.
Shelves in a Space Solutions pantry move in 1-inch steps, which means the layout can change as often as the household does. Raise a shelf when the new blender is taller. Trade a fixed shelf for a pull-out drawer and leave the cabinet box alone. Fixed wire shelving does none of that, which is why it usually stops fitting within two years of move-in.
Adjustability carries the downsizer brief too. We see a lot of Leisure World and Sunland Village kitchens where a couple has moved from a four-bedroom house up north into a 1,400-square-foot single-level home with two kitchens’ worth of pantry goods. The goal there is not maximum cubic feet. It is keeping the weekly staples between knee and shoulder height, shifting anything heavy into drawer banks that slide out to meet you, and either fitting the top zone with a pull-down rack or dropping it lower altogether. No step stools. These are among the most appreciated jobs we do.
Dedicated spice storage takes three forms. Tiered racks that angle each row so labels stay readable from the doorway. Pull-out drawers that hold 40 to 60 standard jars on their sides, labels facing up. Door-mounted rails for the eight or ten you reach for every night. Mesa’s dry air is kind to whole spices, which keep their potency noticeably longer here than in humid regions.
An L-shaped or walk-in pantry always has at least one dead corner, and in the builder walk-ins around Eastmark it is usually two. Lazy susan inserts spin the contents to the front. Full-circle models for a standalone corner, half-moon pull-outs where a full turntable will not clear the frame, and kidney-shaped trays for the awkward spots between.
Wine storage done right is angled cradles, pull-out drawers, and stemware racks planned into the pantry from the start, not screwed on later. A standard cradle section takes 12 to 24 bottles. Reds keep best between 55 and 65 degrees, which makes placement a real decision in a city where July averages 105. A pantry wall shared with the garage, or a west-facing exterior wall, runs hot all summer. We routinely shift wine to an interior wall and buy the client ten to fifteen degrees of thermal buffer at no cost. In a seasonal home, we also talk honestly about whether wine should stay through the summer at all.
Picture a closed cabinet bay with a door that rolls up and away, and the mixer, blender, toaster, and coffee station living inside it. That is an appliance garage. A pull-out shelf raises the appliance to working height, and an outlet inside means nothing gets unplugged every morning. Popular in open-concept Eastmark plans where the great room looks straight into the kitchen, and surprisingly popular in the smaller Dreamland Villa kitchens, where getting four appliances off a short counter changes the whole room.
LED strips built into the shelf edges light a deep pantry from the inside, so there is no need for an overhead fixture. We specify 4000K for accurate color, which matters when you are reading a date code or telling paprika from cayenne, on motion sensors that trigger when the door opens and shut off on their own. Low-voltage draw adds pennies to the bill. Worth noting in a city where the summer SRP statement needs no help.
Gravity-fed can dispensers rotate stock on their own, bringing the oldest can forward as you pull one from the front. Tiered jar shelves step up so the back row stays readable. For bulk-buying households we size the staple zone to what that household actually runs through. For seasonal homes we build it around sealed, gasketed containers that can sit untouched from June to October.
From the kitchen, a hidden pantry reads as an ordinary cabinet door, a bookshelf, or a decorative wall panel. Shut, it vanishes into the cabinetry. Swing it open and there is a complete reach-in or walk-in, fully organized, on the other side. Two very different Mesa situations call for one. In the open-concept plans of southeast Mesa, a concealed door keeps the clean lines the homeowner paid for. In a Downtown Mesa bungalow or a restored home in one of the historic districts, it adds modern storage volume without putting a visibly new element into a period interior.
Honest caveat. A hidden pantry costs more than a standard one, because the door hardware and finish panels are doing real work. If the budget is tight, pull-outs and adjustable shelving deliver more daily benefit per dollar, and we will say so in the consultation.
A pantry follows the same process as every other project we take on. It starts with a call or a web form. Our designer visits your Mesa home, measures the space, and asks how the household actually uses it. What lives in the pantry today? Are you a weekly shopper or a once-a-month warehouse-club run? Does the house sit empty part of the year? Which appliance has lived on the counter for five years because there is nowhere to put it?
Inside a week you get a 3D rendering and an itemized quote, and the quote has nothing hiding in it. Our Phoenix facility builds the cabinetry in 2 to 4 weeks. Install day is half a day to a full day, and the old wire shelving leaves with our crew at no added charge. The designer who measures your kitchen is the same person who signs off at the final walk-through. Noah Peery and Jennifer Peery founded Space Solutions in 1991, still own it, and still run it out of 22515 N. 19th Ave. in Phoenix.
One scheduling note for east Mesa seasonal residents. Book before you leave in spring or right as you arrive in fall. October and November fill fast with homeowners who want the pantry done before the holidays.
Free in-home consultation. 3D design within a week. No pressure, no sales games.
Call (602) 298-6956How much does a custom pantry cost in Mesa?
Size and features drive the number, and most Mesa pantries come in between $2,000 and $8,000. Retrofitting a reach-in
with pull-out trays and adjustable shelving is $2,000 to $3,500. A complete walk-in, floor-to-ceiling built-ins with
lighting and specialty inserts, is $5,000 to $8,000. If the pantry stays and we only add pull-outs and lazy susans,
expect $800 to $2,000. Building a new pantry in a home that never had one depends on the closet or wall we start with,
and we quote it after measuring.
My Mesa home is from the 1980s and the pantry is a narrow closet. Is it worth rebuilding?
In most cases yes. No pantry job comes up more often in Mesa. The 1980s produced more Mesa homes than any other
decade, and those galley pantries waste depth and ceiling height at the same time. Swap the fixed 24-inch shelves for
full-extension pull-out trays and you usually end up with more usable storage than the original ever had, and no wall
gets touched.
My central Mesa home has no pantry at all. Can you build one?
Yes, and it is a regular request in the pre-1970 ranch homes and Dreamland Villa block homes across central and west
Mesa. We convert a hall closet, a coat closet, or a section of wall within roughly 15 feet of the kitchen into a
purpose-built pantry, or build a freestanding pantry cabinet finished to match the room. Either way it reads as part
of the house rather than an addition.
We are seasonal residents in east Mesa. Can a pantry be designed to close up for the summer?
Yes, and we design for it specifically. Doored, sealed cabinetry instead of open shelving so monsoon dust stays out
while nobody is home. Full-extension pull-outs so the spring clean-out and the fall restock each take minutes. A
staple zone built around gasketed containers that can sit untouched from June to October. We also suggest booking
before you leave in spring or right when you arrive in fall, since October and November fill quickly.
What is the timeline for a custom pantry in Mesa, from first visit to install?
3 to 5 weeks. Manufacturing is 2 to 4 weeks at our Phoenix facility, and installation is half a day to a full day. A
faster turnaround is occasionally possible when materials are in stock.
Schedule your free pantry design consultation by calling (602) 298-6956 or by contacting us online. We serve the City of Mesa, the County of Maricopa, and the wider Arizona metropolitan area from our headquarters at 22515 N. 19th Ave, Phoenix AZ 85027. Mesa has been a city of builders since the First Mesa Company cleared the old Hohokam canals in 1878, and the kitchens we work in today span every decade since.
More ways to organize your Mesa home: kitchen organization and storage, laundry rooms, mudrooms, craft rooms, or the Mesa services hub for the full list, including custom closets, garage cabinets, and garage floor coatings.
Space Solutions
22515 N. 19th Ave, Phoenix AZ 85027
Serving the City of Mesa, the County of Maricopa, and the Arizona metropolitan area
(602) 298-6956 | A+ BBB Rated | ROC# 248245 |
Founded 1991 by Noah and Jennifer Peery. 45,000+ Arizona homes served. Lifetime installation warranty.