My Ten Dollar Pan Storage Overhaul

I’ve been meaning to show you my new storage system for pots and pans for a while now.  I have quite a few pots and pans.  And they all get used all the time (we don’t have any specialty pans – it’s all basic saucepans, soup pots, skillets, and a couple of pans for the solar oven).  But everything used to be in one double cabinet next to the stove, and it was always a rat hole.  Part of that was because my boys love to play in that cupboard, but part of it was because we just had too many pots in there.  I didn’t think to take a before picture, but it was bad.

I knew that it would be good to get some of the pans up on the wall.  Then one day I was at the local used building supply store looking for stuff for the basement, and I came across an excellent stainless steel rail that I knew would be perfect as a pot rack.  I’m not sure what its original purpose was, but it’s an excellent pot rack and it was only three dollars.  The bolt that holds one end of it to its wall bracket was stripped, but my parents were here the day I was mounting it and they used a little tool that cuts new threads for a slightly bigger bolt – it worked perfectly.  I went to the hardware store and spent another six dollars on S-hooks, so the whole rack ended up costing nine dollars.

The next problem I needed to solve was lids.  I have several, and they were always in a jumble in the pan cupboard.  So I poked around in the storage section of Goodwill and found a little rack in with the office supplies – I think it’s supposed to be a file holder, but it works for lids too, and I liked the 99 cent price tag.

And now the inside of my pan cupboard looks like this:

Since I forgot to take a before shot, you’ll have to use your imagination.  Picture all of the lids and all of the pans that are now on the wall (plus one more that I donated), stacked on top of the stuff that is currently in the cupboard.  It was not good.

Now it is good.  And it has stayed that way for more than a month.  It’s easy to keep the cupboard organized, because nothing is stacked on top of other things.  Each large pan has a place, and nothing else goes in that place.  The black pans in the back left corner only come out on solar oven days.  The rest of the pans go in and out almost every day – but it’s easy to put them back where they go because their spot never gets taken by anything else.  And since the whole solution was only ten bucks, we didn’t have to worry about how to fit it into the budget or postpone the purchase until after our credit card billing cycle ended.

I’m loving the new organization, and I love the fact that all of it set us back a grand total of ten dollars.