Huge improvement - congratulations! Don't lose heart - as you go along, you'll think of new ways to improve the areas. I use a wire type divider for my lids - it has made it so much easier to locate the right one. Your baking pans could also go into one. Last thought - what if you hung some items on the back of the cabinet?

It looks like you have greatly improved accessiblity to what you need for cooking. And you can now see what you have in the cabinet. That has got to feel great!!! Congrats on getting it done ahead of time.

Looks great! I'm so sorry I didn't remember to take any "before" pictures and just dove into the work. I'd love to show the improvement in my pantry, a complete night-and-day change from what I've been dealing with the whole time living in the apartment. I'm happy every time I open the door. Now to affect the same kind of transformation with my kitchen hutch -- in other words, finally finish this month's project!

Tara, I'm not a very handy person, but I'm curious - how did you hang the pegboard? I'm impressed that you even have cast iron hanging on it. I think something like this could work really well in our kitchen, which has limited space, and a wall where shelves wouldn't really work, but a pegboard might. The house has plaster walls, which I realize always complicates things, but it seems like this might be worth figuring out. :)

It's all in using the hardware that works with your wall type. My apartment is drywall, So I used anchors and long screws not only in the corners, but spaced along the sides, too. I should've added spacers to make it easier for the hooks and things to go through, but overall, it's very sturdy.

Ha! I didn't even realize there were shelves in that cabinet. Way to bust a move!

Wonderful! Might I suggest a good scrub of the bottom of your pans with some bar keeper's friend? Since you are displaying them and all.

Great!

I have to say, I'm not a fan of pegboards. I put them up in the teeny kitchen of my very first apartment, many moons ago, and I took one down in the kitchen of the house I recently bought. They're a catchall for dust, dirt, and grease, and, in the case of my first apartment in the city, a great place for roaches to hide behind. For me, they have a huge "ick" factor.

Well done! They make wall-mounted pot lid racks that might be just the ticket. It looks like you have space below your pegboard.

I love vertical organization! We achieve that with a big ol' hanging pot rack above our kitchen sink. We've moved with that thing, oh... three times now. It's always the first thing up!

Pot lids: Hate dealing with them. They're such a challenge to stack, and I've found that even the little organizing "accordion folder" thingies that promise to stand them upright, one right behind the other, don't work for me. The tops roll off, knock each other down, and overall maintaining order is a royal PITA. I've succumbed to just devoting a deep, wide kitchen drawer just for them. I toss them in, and yank 'em out, and never worry about whether they're stacked neatly. I just can't be bothered... Grr.

If the lid has a true handle (as opposed to a knob - I won't buy/use those - except of course my massive Le Crueset dutch oven which is way to heavy to hang anywhere), I always loop the lid around the handle for the pot and hang both of them together.

Like this:

http://lifehacker.com/5846702/save-cupboard-space-by-hanging-your-pots-and-lids-together

I always go for a rack (not pegboard myself) just so it's easier to clean.

It looks better, but it also looks like you're just spreading out your stuff over more space. It seems like you need to do more culling. Do you need five frying pans on the wall? I have two and have never needed more. It also looks like between the wall and the cabinet you've got about 7 pots to boil things in. With only four burners, this seems like a lot. I also see about five strainers...an enamel one and wire mesh one on the wall and three stacked-neatly- in the corner of your cabinet.
Opinions? Even at Thanksgiving I don't need that many strainers. Does she have too much.
Dear blogger...let it go. You won't have to spend a month doing a cure every year if you have less stuff to manage. :)

First off, well done on getting your life more organized. Secondly, thank you for having a life. It looks like you have small children, and it looks like you enjoy cooking for them ... I haven't read any other blogs from you, but I suspect your kitchen got a little out of control with your priorities and commitments as a mother. That's a good "problem" to have, and it reminds me of my own mother's kitchen. She didn't sweat the small stuff, and I'm thankful for it. Who wants a mom whose only goal in life was to ensure their home looked like it had been styled by a large retailer or design publication? Not me! I want one who baked brownies and helped me with my homework at the kitchen table in the afternoon.

The peg board looks awesome! Good work!

I store our pot lids on the pot. This rule forced us (in a good way) to give up the the pots we weren't using or could live without and there is never any second guessing to if we own a lid for that pot. We save so much time and frustration looking for the lid. Same rule goes for tupperware in our house.

Love pegboard in kitchens.

Agree with marauding cat: if you're going to display those pans, the appearance of their bottoms is important.

You could also think about organizing the contents of the peg board. Say, all the frying pans together in a line. Then smaller things in the gaps. I did this on a pegboard wall in my pantry, and it made it much easier to put the right thing back in the right place and gave the entire display some needed cohesion.

Good job on your pegboard--isn't it a relief to have your workhorses corralled and within reach?

As for pot/pan lids, I have lids with knobs. I just turn the lids upside down and rest them in the top of the pan they belong to. No shifting piles of lids, and I can have short stacks of pots and pans that are easy to see and to retrieve.

Looks like you have some much improved functionality! For those pot lids, I'd suggest a pot lid holder. We have one basically like this installed on the inside of one of our cabinet doors, and it works great and keeps everything handy and wonderfully organized.
http://www.walmart.com/ip/10583488?wmlspartner=wlpa&adid=22222222227000000000&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=&wl3=21486607510&wl4=&wl5=pla&veh=sem

This one also looks promising:
http://www.buy.com/prod/inside-cabinet-door-pot-lid-holder-organizer-rack-new/241887855.html?listingId=244033699

AT also did a post on this awhile back:
http://www.thekitchn.com/five-ways-to-get-your-pot-lids-80185

(I believe that #5 from Ikea is actually the one I have, but I'm not sure they make it anymore. I also like the looks of solution #1.)

If you don't want to drill into your cabinets, you could always put the lid holder on the wall like your pegboard!

I agree with Colbalt Blue; not a fan of peg boards in the kitchen. Plus, it's tough to get the grease cleaned from the bottom of pans unless you scrub away with Bon-Ami so I agree about the ick factor.

That's a nice execution there and like the color.

I did something similar, but with a plastic coated wire grid, originally designed for store wall displays, but sold through Extra Space Storables, and got black hooks to go with. \

Since the grid had sides that made it stand out from the wall a bit, some plastic anchors held it to the wall and it serves the same purpose, as a place to hand some of my pots and colander, and 2 smaller handheld ones. It works and I have a larger IKEA hook for the big 11" chicken fryer that I use quite often, not just to fry chicken, but for leafy green veggies, thanks to it's 3" high straight sides.

All of my lids fit in the bottom drawer of my stove, except for my oval le Creuset Dutch oven as it won't fit, drawer's too small so it sits on the pot that's in the lower cupboard.

Sadly, I've had that grid since the late 90's, and has lived through 3 apartments in that time and the plastic coating is now drying out and flaking off in places so when I move, it'll then get replaced.

Better to spend your time actually cooking (and having cookware that looks like it belongs to a cook) than obsessing over how polished the bottoms of your pans are. I guess you could grab some barkeeper's friend, but really, they look just fine.

Thirding or fourthing Barkeep's Friend: it's a great product (but wear gloves!). I had a hanging rack for pots & pans in my old house, and I came to really love that little can. Makes such a difference when you can see the bottoms of your "workhorses."

Looks great! The pegboard could be an homage to Julia Child, as I believe her kitchen contained something similar.

I use a dish drying rack to store my pot lids. Keeps them organized well.

For pot lids: may I suggest putting a nice catch-all woven basket on your cookbook shelf, say, around the middle shelf (hand level), and stashing the lids there? That way, you have something scenic, low-maintenance, and roomy enough to sort them by size.

The pegboard is a handy idea, especially if you tend to chuck stuff into cabinets. My current apt. has no cabinets, so I keep my lids and pots together in piles on an IKEA kitchen cart (the one with drawers and 2 wheels). Not as handy as a bookshelf, but it fits the spot.

I simply do not understand the aesthetic appeal of pegboard in the kitchen. Maybe I grew up with that dusty, chipping-paint, rotting composite wood pegboard in the garage, full of patina-ed vice grips and rusty screwdrivers (a lovely thing in its own right)... but now I can't make the jump into the kitchen?

I can absolutely appreciate that it creates vertical and organized storage, but it's so hard for me to classify it alongside other, more universally attractive design solutions. And not only because I find the pegboard itself to be unattractive, but pegboard tends to display our cookware and utensils from their least flattering angle: greasy, burnt derriere.

And lastly (bear with me as I make my final argument against this design trend), the overall look of cookware on pegboard is somehow too reminiscent to me of a mish-mash of yardsale goods on a blanket.

I hope my negative opinion here is not taken as a personal insult to the author of the post. At the end of the day, I am pro-organization and pro-cleverness! And I cheer you, Tara, for revealing to us your scariest cabinet in the house, and then doing something to change it! Yay!

my grandmother had just a wire nailed inside the doors of her cupboard, to hold the lids...

I see a lot of the same size items (I count seven, 2-3 QT pots) multiple measuring cups, colanders, cheese graters, etc.
Eliminating excessive duplicates is the key to organization. Purge, purge, and purge some more. If you havent touched it in the past 2-3 months you dont need it...
I guarantee you can donate half of what you are holding on to and become more efficient in the kitchen.

I like pegboards wherever, and I like your version of it. I assume you have your own reasons for keeping the pots and pans you have.

I've been holding out for a few years now for a pot rack that I like, but I think I'm finally going to switch to a pegboard, because I can install it myself, instead of waiting for my husband, who is busy with many other projects.

If you have more wall space, purchase the Grundal bars from Ikea and slip your lids right in. Cheap, easy, and would look good.

Great job! At the end of the day -- especially a long one -- the kitchen is a place for us to cook, and the functionalilty, not the aesthetics, should first and foremost support that endeavor.

I, too, had a similar situation until I was given a butcher block to share the burden of my cramped cupboard. I find that I enjoy cooking so much more when I don't have to get down on my knees and search with a flash light through the jumbled mess. As a person who loves to cook, I appreciate having different size pots and pans for different occasions, so purging was not an option. I guess this was the same for you.

Good on you for knowing what you needed and figuring it out! Happy cooking.

Thanks, Tara! And personally, I like seeing how well-loved the pots are from their bottoms. :)

I'm right with Garimi and LibbyMade on this one. I admit to being a die-hard minimalist on this one (who else do you know that owns a total of 2 dinnerware sets? Yeah...2 plates, 2 bowls, that's it.) but a lot of the clutter really does seem to come from having multiple items. I can't handle a lot of clutter in my admittedly-small apartment, but even in areas where I could afford to stuff a lot of things in, I prefer the minimalistic approach.

Most people forget to declutter before they organize. If you haven't used it in 6 months (especially in the kitchen) you should consider outboxing it for 1-3 months. If you don't use it in that time frame, let it go.

That said, a lot of people like to look and easy access of peg boards. It's not my style, but it looks like you did a great job on yours!

You can always hang lids on the handles of your hanging pots and pans!