How Many Pegs Can a Pegboard Peg?

Really, how many pegboards do I need in my house? Answer: quite a few. Houses as old as mine weren’t exactly built with storage in mind. I guess folks in the twenties just didn’t have nearly so much stuff, and we modern residents have to get creative to keep things from getting too cluttered. So after we had a pegboard cut to size to address our storage problem in the office last week there was no way I was letting the 3′x4′ remnant go to waste. I had big plans for that sucker.

In a cruel twist of irony our house actually has a huge closet that makes the other two (that’s right, only three closets total in this joint) look like shoeboxes. It’s unmanageably large, actually. And the long and narrow dimensions aren’t doing us any favors.

As you can see, we pretty much rely on it to serve the functions of a shed, garage, and attic all in one, none of which we actually have. Technically, we do have an attic, but it’s not floored and the entrance is barely big enough to squeeze a person through, much less a bunch of stuff we want to store. So all the stuff that would go in an attic (or in some sort of utility storage like a garage or shed) gets tossed in here instead. We’ve got rarely used items and Christmas decorations tucked up under the stairs, all of our tools perched in the spaces between the studs, paint cans and random crap lining the top shelf, and spare lumber piled up near the back. Some people who live here have a bad habit of leaving the most recently used items near the entrance, though don’t ask me what the ice chests are doing there because we haven’t used them since last summer.

This closet has some big organizational problems. Bigger than I was willing to tackle on this particular day. But I was willing to take one small step: I was going to hang up that piece of pegboard. I marked out where I wanted it to go and Nick drilled holes for it right into the studs. We didn’t need to attach small pieces of wood behind it like a pegboard usually requires since the studs were exposed like this. Very convenient.

Then we screwed it into the wall. Easy peasy. While I had Nick handy I had him move some things around so there wasn’t such a logjam at the front of the closet. The big stuff got pushed to the back so it was still accessible but out of the way. The barstool, in case you’re wondering, is what I use to climb up and access the top shelf. I’m not quite as spritely in my pregnant state and have recently started abiding by a self-imposed ban on climbing up on things, but I don’t have anywhere else to put the barstool anyway, so it stays. Maybe I’ll find myself standing on it again in another six months or so.

We just attached the pegboard to those three studs furthest from the camera. It wasn’t quite long enough to stretch across all four studs so we had to choose one or the other, and I was thinking the further back in the closet it was the better. I suppose I could have scooched it over a bit more so that it was centered across those three studs, but I didn’t.

I picked up this assortment of pegboard accessories at Lowe’s last week for about $7. It was kind of hard to tell what it all was poured out like this, though. I remember from the pegboard at my old house that those black things are to help secure the hooks to the board, but I always found them kind of useless.

I decided to hang all the hooks up on the pegboard so I could see what I was working with.

Then I got started hanging my stuff up. These heavy, dangerous, precariously perched tools were pretty high on the priority list.

Ta-da! I feel much safer and less stressed walking into this place now.

Look how nice and neat everything is! Y’all just have no idea how happy this makes me. It’s like a little organization island in a sea of chaos.

There’s still a lot of empty space on the far side of the pegboard, but all I’ve got left is small hooks. What I really think I need next is some hanging baskets and bins for all the small stuff, and maybe some sort of contraption to hang screwdrivers and pliers and whatnot.

There’s still a ton to be done in this closet, not the least of which is some serious purging. But I’m taking babysteps, people. Babysteps.