The Best Pot Lid Organizer Is Already In Your Office

Go into your kitchen and look into the cabinet where you keep all the saucepans. Chances are it's a mess in there — big lids, small lids, round lids, lids for cast iron pans, lids for Dutch ovens, lids for pots you don't even own anymore. In all fairness, storing pot lids isn't as easy as stacking plates or bowls together. You can't store them separately from the pots because you'll lose track of which lid goes with what, but if you keep storing them in this big pile of cast iron and metal cooking ware, it's just going to keep piling up. 

Fortunately, there are many ways you can go about organizing your pot lids in a neat and efficient way. The Home Depot suggests using a magnetic strip, or a piece of magnetized metal, as a way to keep your pot lids suspended from behind a cabinet door (provided the pots are magnetic, of course). Martha Stewart suggests keeping smaller pot lids in a drawer, using a common hardware store tension rod, which helps keeps the lids from sliding around in the drawer and gives you easier access to them. 

You can also do a bit of reorganizing and some early spring cleaning, discarding old pots and their lids that you no longer use as often to help reduce clutter. You may also have a tool at your workplace, or just sitting on a desk somewhere in your house, maybe even next to the computer as you read this.

If you work in an office, a mail sorter's probably nothing special. It's just a piece of metal that's used to hold ingoing or outgoing mail or is covered in old documents and files. While this piece of office equipment isn't anything too exciting when at the office at work or at home, it can actually help you in the kitchen as a handy sorter.

As Joe Sevier of Epicurious explains, a mail sorter is perfect for holding your pot lids because of its unique design. As a mail sorter usually consists of three tiers, each of differing lengths, you can take a sorter, lay it on its back, and then slide your pot lids into the slots. The mail sorter will keep the lids upright and easily accessible, rather than thrown inside a cabinet that you have to dig around for. Of course, it all depends on how deep your mail sorter is and the size of your lids. You may not be able to fit all of your lids onto the sorter, but you can probably at least use three lids from the pots you use the most often.

Better Homes and Gardens also recommends this method for storing plastic container lids, which no doubt are equally as hard to store as pot lids. Since plastic lids may be thinner than most pot lids, you can store many more lids using the mail sorter this way.

If you were to go into your closet, you'll probably find a bunch of your old CDs you've been holding onto. Look past your "A Tribe Called Quest," "Soundgarden," and "Neutral Milk Hotel" CDs and you'll find your old CD rack. While this once held all of your cherished '90s music collections from ska to grunge to rap, it can also be used to hold your pot lids. According to Lifehacker, you can use your CD rack the same way you use the mail sorter, sliding lids into the different slots to keep them upright and organized. Another bonus of using CD racks is that many CD racks are inexpensive and can be found in many retail stores.

Another useful method for storing pot lids (one that surprisingly doesn't involve racks) is the utilization of "command hooks." As Bob Vila explains, if you've never heard of command hooks before, they're plastic hooks that stick to your wall with strong adhesive, allowing them to be used for a variety of hanging or storage purposes. By sticking a few command hooks to the inside of a tall cabinet door or an open space on the kitchen wall, you can hang your lids on the hooks, allowing for even more space on your counter. The only concern may be that the hooks must be secure, or else you'll be treated to the sound of heavy pot lids hitting your counter quite often.