Illustrated in Fig. 4.8 above is a pass-through butler’s pantry placed between the kitchen and the dining room.
In this particular case, the builder used four different architects for his projects, each of which had different floor plan dimensions for the size of these butler’s pantries that varied from house to house.
Because this builder used 2’-8” wide interior doors standard throughout the house, and 3-1/2” wide casing…the opportunity was available to standardize the floor plan dimensions for every house design to provide adequate clearance for everything to fit.
For whatever reason, this was not done.
Figure 4.9 shows a standard sketch detail that could have been given to each of the builder’s architects…along with other cheat-sheet sketches…that illustrate the minimum dimensions for the butler’s pantry…for a 24-inch countertop, 23-inch lower cabinet, and drywall reveals on each side of the door opening casing…requiring a minimum overall dimension of 5’-6” (66 inches).
Figure 4.10 shows a butler’s pantry that was designed with a dimension less than 5’-6” (face-of-stud to face-of-stud)…with the door casing on the right side removed for the installation of the lower cabinet and countertop. The casing was then later scribe-cut to fit around the cabinet and countertop…giving the appearance of poor design.
In this particular case, the in-house interior designer may have assumed a standard 24” countertop and a 23” cabinet, or gotten poor measurements from the field, in specifying items for the butler’s pantry that did not fit.
Standardizing everything from the 5’-6” wall space to the 23-inch cabinet and 24-inch countertop…for every project uniformly…would have prevented this reoccurring dimensional bust of ripping door casing to fit…which for this builder resurfaced again and again on about half of their new projects.
