My rental apartment has a small kitchen and though it has a lot of storage, it doesn’t have a lot of it that’s within easy reach (I’m short!). But it does happen to have a gap between the fridge and the cabinets so I decided to make use of that wasted space and convert it into a pullout pantry. There’s many types you can buy, like this one, but I thought it would be more fun to make my own DIY version!

The gap measured 6″ so I chose 1×6″ pine boards since they are actually 5.5″ wide. I had all my lumber cut at the hardware store to make this project got faster.I used a speed square to mark the location of the shelves on both side boards at the same time to make sure they were lined up.

I started putting the cabinet together by putting on the casters on the bottom of a shelf and then attaching it to the side boards – I wanted to reused casters that I already had and they work fine but ideally you would want to use wheels that don’t swivel for a project like this since the wheels only need to roll in one direction. I attached all the remaining shelves, lines up with the marks I had made earlier.For the rails, you can use dowels but I wanted a different look so I used 1/4″ screen molding that I attached to the sides with small corner brackets. A bit more work but I prefer that look.I’m very happy with the end result and I’m also quite impressed with the amount of stuff that can fit in such a narrow space! It does need to stay supported on either side because it is so tall and narrow so I used a small hook on the side of the cabinet to prevent it from coming out all the way. You can see how I did that, as well as a lot more details on this project in this video. Hope you like this project and let me know in the comments if this is something you would do.