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Organizing the kitchen – pot rack!

Cooking has been interesting since we moved into our house.  It turns out our previous roommates were the ones that owned the pots and pans, so when we moved in together we had a combined 2 pans.  One was a 3" fry pan for making an egg, the other a 10" cast iron pan.  I happen to love cast iron cooking, but it's not for everything.  On top of the pan situation, we've been refinishing the floors in the kitchen and painting the cabinets, so the kitchen hasn't been that accessible.  Needless to say we've been grilling.  A lot.

With all that said, we were beyond excited when we got our new Calphalon cooking set as wedding gifts.  The only problem?  We had no where to put it!  After a week of having all the pots splayed out on the guest bed, we finally picked out a pot rack we liked.  I spent Saturday morning hanging it without too many glitches and no broken pans!  Here are the steps:

1. Find the floor joists in the ceiling (if your pots aren't too heavy you can probably get away with hanging from the drywall if you use heavy duty anchors, but I wanted to go with the joists so I know it will never come crashing to the floor!).  I tried finding joists with my stud finder but that proved hard with the textured ceiling.  I had a pretty good idea where they were, but I ended up having to drill 1/8" holes to see if I was hitting stud or just air.  Once I found studs I used spackle to fill the extra holes.
2. Screw in the hooks and give them a pull to make sure they're really in there.
3. Hang the pot rack from the hooks.  Ours had a single metal hook so the pot rack was at a fixed height.  If the height was bad we were going to buy some chain to adjust it perfectly, but the hooks ended up being good.  
4. Set a level on the pot rack and adjust the ceiling hooks or chains until everything is level.

 Here's how ours looked when it was all said and done.  Katrina was in charge of organizing the pots for easy access and aesthetic display - I always think I have a good eye for design until I see how awesome Katrina is at this kind of thing.  She's amazing!

We used an Ikea wall lid rack that Katrina already had (sorry, it's discontinued) to organize the lids on a nearby wall: