When you live in a house of 4 people who thoroughly enjoy both food and the ritual of cooking, the kitchen has a tendency to rapidly clutter up. We were having a hard time trying to find homes for all our pots and pans. These include small, and large of stainless steel, cast steel, and cast iron pans plus a few specialty pans and lids for many of them. Suffice it to say with all that cookware we quickly ran out of storage space. So we decided to hang them from the kitchen island counter top. The island was something we put together with 2 IKEA Trestles and a white counter top from Craigslist, so we had no qualms about modifying it as needed. Screwing in some heavy duty hooks into pre-drilled holes on the underside was easy enough.

The trickiest part was making sure the screws would leave enough space to allow the pans to swing without banging against each other. I organized them by type then by size. All the stainless steel pots (saucepans) are on the stove side, and the stainless steel saute pans, cast steel, and cast iron pans fit much more densely along the back.

My roommate came up with a clever solution for storing the lids: simply slide the lid handle around the handle of the corresponding pan, then stick the handle on the hook.