Pot racks are like minivans with automatic doors, once you spoil yourself with one, you can never go back to not having one.  Which is why I’ve never had a minivan with automatic doors.   I cannot imagine my future self whining and complaining about having to open a car door, how annoying I would be. Back when we moved into this house with the pre-installed hooks just begging for a pot rack I was sure I wouldn’t use them. We have an embarrassing amount of cabinet space.  More than enough to store all of our pots and pans.

But after a few months of living here, the thought of being able to just grab a pot from above instead of unstack it from a pile in a cabinet was just too enticing.  It’s been two years since I dedicated a post to all things pot rack so I thought it was time to revisit.  And my pot collection has grown.

Not only does my Ikea pot rack keep me from whining about having to reach into the dreaded cabinet to get my pots {oh the humanity} it also does something just as important for me.  We are renting and as much as I appreciate a nice newish kitchen, this kitchen is not really my style and it’s all I can do sometimes to not whip out the can of paint.  So, a pot rack is a great way for me to personalize a not so personal kitchen.  So I purposely put white and aqua on my pot rack to help spread the Nester style love.

see the empty pot rack back there?

A few months ago when I was going through one of my purging stages, I cleaned off the pot rack and took it down to see if I liked it better without all that junk hanging up over us.  I asked my husband what he thought and I’ll never forget his words, “It looks like we just moved in and we don’t know what we are doing.”  For some reason I took that as a huge compliment that somehow the fact that I had a bunch of junk hanging from our pot rack that my husband hits his head on because if I hang it higher I cannot reach it which is an even bigger annoyance for him because then he has to walk in and hand me every pot I need–made my husband feel like “we knew what we were doing”.

One of the other tricks I do with my pot rack is make sure to stagger the heights where stuff is hanging.

For me that meant digging in my junk drawer till I found some brown wrapped wire and twisting that up then hanging a hook on that.  You could do the same with ribbon or twine.  But I like that some of my pretty stuff is hanging at different heights.  I even added hooks to those awful chains that hang down.  I know I could cut those chains off but you know one of my renting mantras, if I might use it in another house soonish, why permanently altar something just so it can work better in this house?

My pot rack is still a work in progress, I need about 10 more hooks to really be able to hang everything I want and to balance stuff out~then I’ll really look like I know what I’m doing.

Pot racks….love ’em or hate ’em?