Being an older home, there is a large window in the middle of the kitchen. Meaning there is not a whole lot of cabinet space (luckily there is a decently big pantry for food storage). And pots just seem to take up so much room in cabinets. If we had put them in the few cabinets we have, there would be no room for much else. In an old apartment we had a pot rack (just one of those small oval ones) and loved the way displaying our pots looked. Especially now that we have more appealing stainless steel pots. So thus the idea of a pot rack was born.
Traditionally people put pot racks over islands. Well we don't have an island in our kitchen so that idea was out. There are also wall mounted ones, except we don't have any open walls in our kitchen to hang one. Scratch that idea too. I've also seen over the stove. Well we have our microwave there. That idea wont work. In our apartment we had it hanging over the bar area. Well we just knocked out that wall to open up the room and hanging something would close it off again and cut up the kitchen. Nope not a good idea. Then came the idea of hanging a rack from the ceiling in front of the window. The window is essentially wasted space in a kitchen where storage space is in high demand.
So now the trick was trying to find/figure out a pot rack that would work in front of the window. Most of the commercially made ones were too small and/or too wide. Since the window is so large (about 5 feet wide) a small pot rack would just look off in front of it. Not to mention it wouldn't be able to hold all of our pots and pans. We also didn't want a oval/rectangular one since it would stick out from the cabinets and just look awkward in our opinions. So I came up with this idea of hanging a curtain rod from the ceiling. It would be able to be hung out from the window so any swinging pots wouldn't break the glass, be able to extend then entire width of the window, and not stick out from the front edge of the cabinets.
This post is starting to get a little wordy, so I'll cut to the chase. Hanging a curtain rod from the ceiling is a lot harder than one would think. So to Home Depot we went to figure out a plan B (or C or D... not sure where we were at this point). We ended up in the section with all the conduit. And came up with the idea of half inch conduit (seemed to be large enough to hold the weight spanning 5 feet but not too large to look bulky). A couple of elbows and floor flanges would attach all the pipes together into a U and to the ceiling.
We bought some large S-hooks for the pots to hang from. This ended up being a bit more work than expected since the opening was too small to get the hooks onto the pipe. After a bit of prying, we got them all open enough and onto the pipe.
Last step was hanging the pots.
We think it looks great in the room. Give some purpose to the space of the window and a bit of sculptural art. It also adds a bit of industrial to the kitchen/house.
