These £12 pan-lid holders have made my tiny kitchen tolerable again

Gamechangers: Why risk daily injury and fumbling when you can have blissfully organised cupboards?

These storage lifesavers come with a super strong adhesive to secure them in place (iStock/The Independent )

My favourite hobby is finding out ways to fit all my other hobbies into my tiny flat.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a cupboard under the stairs. But my partner and I live in around 35 square metres of space in south-east London. We love our home – it keeps us from hoarding too much stuff and we are metres away from a lively local high street. But our interests – snow sports, bicycle touring, camping, sewing, cooking and even some light woodworking – are not really compatible with our one-bed.

We’ve put up shelves pretty much everywhere – we call the set in the bathroom “the garage” as it’s home to paint pots and cleaning supplies. We have three bicycles on our walls and another two in an off-site shed. But, of all of our pursuits, it’s our love for cooking that proves the most awkward on the daily.

Our regular dance around each other while we prepare a meal – opening cupboards, dodging the bin, not accidentally knifing each other – is complex and high-stakes. And we’re always working hard to consolidate packets of this and that, finding an extra few square centimetres to host a new bottle of kecap manis.

But mostly, it’s the bloody pan lids. Once a week at least, one or more would come crashing to the floor after being precariously placed on top of a lunchbox or wine glass. They would smash to the ground with a horrendous clang that would shock you into making a mess of what you were doing. Often they would hit me directly, right in the forehead.

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Thankfully I never had a pan-lid-induced concussion, but I’d be lying if I said it’s not a situation I had mentally rehearsed for. I knew there had to be a better way, and I needed to find it before any serious injuries occurred.

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Joseph Joseph cupboardstore set of four pan lid holders: £12, Josephjoseph.com

(Joseph Joseph)

In a beautiful example of the Gamechangers column being a self-fulfilling prophecy, after reading my last recommendation, a friend of mine told me that her number one household item was a set of Joseph Joseph pan lid holders.

I’ll be honest, I had googled these before and discounted them due to poor reviews. But the confidence provided by my trustworthy pal was all I needed to bite the bullet. And boy, am I glad I did.

Honestly, they are life changing to the extent that I found it very difficult to write the intro to this piece, because the universe in which I was regularly hit by pan lids has dematerialised in a puff of smoke. It seems like an alien timeline – I can’t believe I previously lived in fear of falling kitchenware.

Now, I simply slot the lids of our various saucepans of different sizes into these little brackets that we’ve affixed to the inside of our cupboards. And the cupboard shelves are now so much easier to keep neat and tidy, as everything has its place.

Some people do complain they are the wrong size for their lids, so be careful to measure up before you order. But we’ve found the other major complaint that reviewers have – that the holders fall off – does not tally with our experience. The stickers that come with the product are made from some of the strongest commercially available adhesive out there, and we’ve found it to be perfectly reliable. We used some bike-chain degreaser on the cupboard door beforehand to make sure it was super clean – we’d recommend you use a similarly powerful cleaner ahead of installation.

And that’s it, really. You can often accuse Joseph Joseph of over-engineering simple household items, but not here. They hold pan lids, securely, and now I tell everyone about them.

For more gamechanger purchases, read our review of the £5 moisturiser that ended our reviewers lifelong battle with eczema