Honestly, I'm confused. How big is your pantry closet? 36" long x 24" deep? Or is it 36" long by 36" deep and you want to narrow the depth to 24" and put a 12" deep cabinet BEHIND it? I cannot picture this at all! Do you have cabinets next to the fridge right now or just a deep pantry closet? OK, well, you only have a coat closet if you completely get rid of the pantry closet, therefore I say that you must have at a minimum a 24"x24" utility / broom closet. As far as an actual "pantry" goes, it's hard to say without a floorplan. A well designed pantry is invaluable, a poorly designed pantry is a major waste of space. If you have a small kitchen and lack counterspace then you may be better off without a pantry, but usually that would be replacing it with 24" deep base cabs and 12" deep uppers. You still need storage space - the equivalent of what your pantry held at least. A "pantry" stores food. A "closet" stores non-food items such as cleaning supplies and, well, yes, dog food too. A pantry can be replaced with the equivalent in cabinets (drawer base - regular base cabs are just as bad as a poorly designed pantry). Food and non-food items should have separate storage spaces - otherwise you end up with a mess as you apparently have right now (as do I - my pantry is poorly designed and at the opposite end of the dining room diagonally across from the kitchen - I don't know what the builder was thinking). Note that a 24" deep pantry only works if it is a pull-out, otherwise 12-15" shelves are the way to go.

We also converted from framed to frameless. All drawers. We did this first before making final decisions. We got so much more useable space, we decided not to have a pantry. We got more counter space. Today, it is still a happy choice. We kept moving forward step by step, re-using old counter material and fillers like plywood until we bought a new fridge. Even though it was a tall 24"wide one, we decided to hide it down the hall and buy an undercounter fridge. That shows you how much we loved having ever more counter! Later we recessed our wall oven and put a piece of counter in front of it. 9" by 24". More counter! -- Deep long drawers will astound you. They bring objects to you. Today, you get on all fours to rummage around in the dark. It's a disincentive. Your kitchen has a wide aisle. You could make your new counter overhang by many inches and still have a wide aisle. With full extension drawers it is not significant when your counter overhang is large. Make uppers deep, with frosted glass fronts, that swing up. We installed Ikea's Akurum base cabinets upside down (they are symmetric), so we got more room to install the deep drawers. Before doing it, I posted questions about this in GW and in Ikeafans; the response was the wildest hecklefest I could have imagined. But it worked and it increased drawer volume. Later I removed the crossbeams (MDF) under the new counter. More volume. It all worked. Our counter is 2cm thick; this also gave us more space. Prices are $24 Ikea 70107069 RATIONELL N 24"w fully-extendable (Blum M-height) $30 Ikea 90109977 RATIONELL N 24"w fully-extendable (Blum C or D-height) Deep Drawers and glides. They come with the clips for the fronts, but not the fronts. See http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/kitchbath/msg0718520230561.html I added to this thread earlier today. In that post there is more information on other topics related to small kitchens. Here is a link that might be useful: Small kitchens HAVE to have __

We replaced our side by side refrigerator (old GE, replaced with Whirlpool) with another side by side, and am not pleased with it. Mainly because the doors do not open as wide as the old one. The ice maker in the freezer works good but when the automatic defrost takes place, the cubes melt a little and sort of clump up in the bottom of the bin. They are fed out through the door, and that is good. Our refrigerator is not a cabinet depth so maybe one of those would be different. Oh, ours is white.

@jabaz, I have a Bosch dishwasher that I love, so Bosch is on our short list. I looked at one of the their Refrigerators this weekend. My main hesitation is that they only have one regular depth fridge. I don’t think it has all the features I want and I’m not sure I can convince my husband to buy a counter depth one—regardless of brand. They just look so tiny inside. I’m short so it might be a nice change for me, since it is hard for me to reach things in the back of the top shelves. And, by top shelves, I mean every shelf except the bottom shelf. :) @Daisy S, that sounds like the same problem we are having. We also got the extended service plan and have been waiting 9 weeks for them to fix it! The service tech came out within 3 days and then stopped answering his phone. Every time I would call Whirlpool all they would do is call and leave the tech another message. They finally decided to give us some $ back, but it is capped at 75% purchase price not including tax or delivery. As you know, tax isn’t pocket change on an appliance purchase! My sales tax is at 10%!