Life Hack # 1 - Organized kitchen pans.

This week, I don't have a recipe for you but I do have something that still deals with the kitchen. If you're like me, you have a lot of pans and it is probably hard to sort through them all when you keep them in that drawer under the stove. (I think that there are stoves made now that still have this feature, but I know that there are shelves that get everything thrown on them too.) I was having problems with getting the right pan in quick order for cooking. Let me tell you, when it is a day where dinner's late, you don't want to hunt through a stack of pans to find the one you want. It makes everybody cranky.

There is, however, an option. If you have wall space free and it is a good sturdy one, placing some hooks to hang pans from is a fantastic idea. Some lucky folks have the money and the space to splurge on an over head pot rack. Those are pretty awesome for your light weight pots, but I don't trust 'em with my cast iron. Those I would still hang on the wall. Make sure that your hook is large enough to accommodate a little room for your lid to hang with the pot and you can keep your lids right with them.

Some of us are lucky enough to have deep cupboards where we can store more than just food. Here is where I use the free standing miniature shelves and paper sorters. I use the paper sorter to hold my light weight pans and my cast iron. It works well because it converts the space used from being the widest part of the pans to the narrowest. This means you can fit more pans in there. And you can keep the lids with the pans in another sorter right beside or below it. Or, if you don't have the shelf space, you can hang your lids.

Those command hooks from 3M are really amazing. I like the ones that you can remove eventually. This is because we are renting our home and someday we'll move. That means we'll have to get rid of the hooks. They hold a good deal of weight. I have two of them holding my kids backpacks next to the door. (I'll talk about how I made an entryway where there wasn't one next week.) There is usually enough distance between the door and the shelf itself that you can hang a pot lid in there with out any problems closing the door.

Those free standing shelves I mentioned I use for my sauce pots. I keep the lids on the pots and set them one over the other on the shelf. It effectively doubles your space. And, if your cupboard is wide enough, you have a little bit of space at either side where you can slide in another pan that fits. What you have left to worry about then is cookie sheets. And you can keep those piled up in that drawer under the stove with no big deal. Because you'll have the rest of your pans put away nice and tidy.

There's the first of my occasional life hack posts. I don't know how often I'll be sharing them, but I will be doing this instead of recipes when I have one of those days where I can't pick what to post. Have a beautiful day everyone.