The beauty of peg boards is that they’re modular. They are adjustable and customizable, meaning you can tailor them to your particular needs. This allows for endless possibilities, which can be both exciting and a little daunting. Keep reading to learn how to strike the perfect balance between visual beauty and practicality in order to get the most out of your DIY kitchen peg board.
Fill your peg board with high-use items.
One of my favourite things about having a peg board as open storage is that everything is easily accessible. So this may seem obvious — but fill it with your most highly-used items. For example, I filled mine with my pour-over coffee accessories and my favourite mugs; loose-leaf teas and a tea infuser; strainers (I’m Italian, so I eat a *lot* of pasta…); measuring cups and spoons; my most-used dried herbs and spices; a garlic crock (again, I’m Italian…). Those things you reach for every day, multiple times a day. Having high-use items so easy to grab will assuredly make a huge difference in the flow of your time in the kitchen.
Be creative with how things are displayed.
Peg boards are made of shelves *and* pegs — so use them both to your advantage! Move your shelves around to accommodate the varying heights of different items, and use the pegs on their own to hang things off of. (I love the little collection of mugs hanging in the bottom right-hand corner!) In addition, the stand-alone pegs really come in handy whenever there is a big, awkward blank space to fill. Try adding a single peg and hang something that’s shaped appropriately to fill that gap! (I find strainers work really well for this.)
Use cup hooks to your advantage!
In reference to my last point — you’re not just limited to the shelves and the pegs themselves. I added a row gold cup hooks to the bottom of the longest shelf so that I could hang all my favourite measuring cups and spoons in a row. (These are from Crate & Barrel by the way, and the gold / wood combo is everything to me.)
Decant your food items.
Decanting things from their original containers takes things that normally don’t look very pretty in their box-store packaging and makes them display-worthy. I have four different varieties of loose-leaf tea on the top shelf in clear containers with bamboo lids, and (my favourite part) I have all my dried herbs and spices in these hella stylish DIY apothecary-style spice jars. Huge opportunity here to merge fashion with function.
Not *everything* has to be functional.
That plant in the upper left-hand corner? It has no use except for to be a little bit of decoration — and that’s okay. Not everything has to have a functional use. The (faux) plant adds some greenery, texture, and the long trailing vines fill that awkward negative space just to the left of the garlic crock. Putting your more decorative additions (that you’ll never need to access) up on the highest shelves keeps them out of the way and leaves you with more real estate on the lower shelves to put the things you use most frequently.
Experiment!
Not everything is going to look perfect on your first go. That’s the beauty of the peg board: it is 100% non-committal. If you try something and it looks dumb, you can move it. No biggie. Shuffle shelves around, move your items around, and don’t be afraid to play! These tips will give you some helpful rules to play by and guidance if you’re feeling lost; but ultimately, you really just need to let go of the mentality that you’ll nail it on your first shot. Dive in and experiment. Nothing is permanent. Plus, you can always come back to this post if you need some extra pointers. 🙂
