This concrete cinder block pantry shelf comes together quickly, stands alone, and offers all the sturdiness you could need to shelve those home canned mason jars, store bought tin cans, pancake batter mixes, and any other pantry food extras you have in your home. And all for the price of a few concrete cinder blocks purchased at your local hardware or lumber store.
Cost to Build
Building a pantry shelf out of cinder blocks is perhaps one of the most inexpensive ways you will find to build shelving unit.
The most importable piece of this building fun is, or course, buying the concrete cinder blocks.
With blocks costing between just $2 and $4 a piece, it’s easy to build a decent sized shelving unit under $20.
“Building” a Concrete Pantry Shelf
Perhaps one the most convenient features of a cinder block pantry shelf is there is less building involved, and skill required, then there is in building a Lego tower.
And what’s more, if you find yourself needing to rearrange or transport your prized pantry to another room, different house, or road trip it to another state – this pantry shelf comes together (and comes apart) in about 5 minutes.
Simply place blocks, add shelf board, and repeat.
… and repeat.
Until your ready to start stacking.
When shopping at a large building store, toddlers and baby in tow, I made sure the block size I purchased was tall enough to fit a standard quart-sized mason jar in between. I was building this shelf solely for storing home canned foods, all of which was canned in either a quart, pint, or half-pint sized glass mason jar.
A regular mouth quart jar comes in right at 7 inches tall. So that was my standard.
I ended up choosing cinder blocks that were just 7.5 inches tall, knowing that just half an inch of wiggle room would be tight, but also wanting to buy the thinner blocks.
You see, the blocks I went with were 7.5” tall and 5.75” wide. Other blocks, even though slightly taller, were up to a full inch wider. Trying to create as much space as possible, I went with the skinnier block. The 7.5”x5.75”.
Mistake!
Although the jars did technically fit between the shelf rows, I failed to account for the boxes my jars were stored in. Having just ½” if head space, there wasn’t any room to reach in and grab jars except from the very front, so in order to see the food items in my storage, I kept them in boxes.
Although the original boxes the jars come in purchased from the store work great, I find I much prefer old peach boxes because of their thickness. They offer just a little more security in thickness of cardboard versus the thin cardboard the jar shipping box is made from.
But these thicker cardboard boxes meant that my jars stood a little taller.
And then there were the tabs on the boxes. … Needless to say, I needed more than 7.5” of height for my shelves.
Lesson learned:
Buy blocks that offer a minimum of 1” head space from the height of your jars (or whatever items you plan to store).
All is Well that Ends Well
Despite my error in block height, I was able to easily fix my mishap with the addition of simple 10” block of 1”x5” board stacked between the cinder block and shelf boards. This added block of wood gave me just a little bit of extra space, allowing better ease to slide my boxed jars in and out.
