Pot Rack

Our kitchen cupboards would make Martha Stewart weep tears of despair. Hell, they’d make Ozzy Osbourne weep tears of despair. They were like one of those cartoons where the kid’s mother opens his bedroom closet and an avalanche of toys come flooding out. I really wanted one of those old-bed-frame-hanging-from-the-ceiling pot racks, but given our real estate agent’s strong feelings about Blu-tac, I suspect she wouldn’t be handing out lollipops for hooks in the ceiling. I went to the tip shop with $5 in my pocket, and as usual it obliged.

I didn’t bother taking a proper ‘before’ photo, since I was fairly certain there’d be nothing that would warrant an ‘after’ photo anyway.

This is why I don’t measure things: because even when I do, I still get it home and discover it’s THREE CENTIMETRES TOO WIDE. We ended up tearing the entire thing apart with a crowbar and a very large hammer, sawing a few centimetres off the shelves and rebuilding it, which also allowed me to pick the heights of the shelves to suit the implements. 

The advantage of having torn the side off was having extra bits of wood, so I measured and sawed them to the length between two of the shelves and nailed them in as cooking-tray dividers. I placed the cup hooks through the technical method of holding the pot approximately where I wanted it, marking the spot with pencil and screwing the hook in. I also put three on the side facing the oven so I wouldn't have to wrestle with the drawers every time I wanted a spatula, which often literally do not open because they're so crammed with every half-melted kitchen implement my mother no longer wanted.

The pot lids are sitting in some kind of plate drainer, but balancing them in there is like playing a particularly delicate game of Jenga, so eventually I’ll have to find something wider. The back of the rack has no bracing: it’s sandwiched in so tightly it doesn’t matter, but if it was standing alone, it’d crumble like a nail-studded pack of cards.

The first time we dragged it into the kitchen, we discovered that we couldn’t actually open the kitchen cupboard to the left of it. I cheerfully declared that we could drink from Tupperware containers from now on, but Lawrence suspected my housemates wouldn’t share the sentiment, so we dragged it back out and hacked off most of the uprights of the top left shelf. The part that remains used to hold our mixing bowl, back in the happy days when we actually had one.

Martha Stewart can now redirect her wrath to the hideous 1950s browny-yellow shagpile carpet in the living room.