How To Make Your Own Tool Organizer Using Products At The Dollar Store

Crafters need tools, whether we're throwing pottery or burnishing vinyl from a Cricut, and we want them at hand as quickly as possible. Doctors have nurses, electricians have journeymen, and scientists have grad students to slap the right tool into their hands at the right time. What you need for your more solitary DIY endeavors is a lazy susan tool caddy with a place for everything and (you guessed it) everything in its place. Perhaps this is why TikTok maker DIYholic says she's obsessed with her double-sided pegboard organizer. It puts more than 2 square feet of organized tools within easy reach and in a compact space that leaves you plenty of room to work. The genius of this craft room organization hack is getting the pegboard off the wall and onto your work surface.

@IDYHolic's organizer is built around large square pegboard panels ($5 for four) and adhesive rinks ($2.50 for two four-packs). You'll also need a few other bits you can find any time — a rotating 9-12 platter like this acrylic lazy susan turntable ($8) or this glass turntable ($15.59) from Amazon, glue, some double-sided tape, and pegboard hooks to suit your needs. But before you buy your supplies, let's look at how it's built and how you might customize it to suit your own personal needs.

There's really nothing daunting about making this organizer. You begin by attaching two pairs of pegboard panels back-to-back using the adhesive rinks. The usage of the word "rink" here is a bit of a mystery, but these are devices for attaching the pegboards to things — in this case, to each other. The resulting double-sided panels are then stacked on an edge and stuck together using double-sided tape, perhaps from another set of adhesive rinks, to make a double-height pegboard. The glass lazy susan and one short edge of the pegboard assembly are sanded to make the Krazy Glue more effective when stuck together to finalize the caddy. (You might get better results from a thicker, more viscous adhesive like epoxy or a polyurethane like Gorilla Glue or construction adhesive.) The whole project takes just a few minutes.

You can streamline the project based on what you have on hand and to fit your particular needs. There's no reason you can't use a thicker glue for the whole thing, eliminating the adhesive rinks. And we've seen similar projects that use marbles sandwiched between two pie plates in place of a lazy susan. 

You might, for example, make a four-sided organizer instead, which would open up a center well for storing long tools. The lazy susan at the base of @DIYholic's organizer makes a great shelf for large accessories like a hot glue gun. You could adapt the project to make this platform larger, to accommodate something like a soldering workstation, or to feature little bins to hold common parts for your creations — buttons, perhaps, or hooks for jewelry-making.

But the star of the show is the pegboard, and that's where most of the potential lies for making this project your own. Pegboards are flexible enough to use for all of your organizing needs. They are common and standardized, making accessories easy to come by, and inexpensive compared with commercial solutions like slatwall. Pegboard accessories often come in kits that include a wide range of useful pieces. You'll be familiar with the pegs themselves, which are handy for hanging anything with a hole through it. For other tools like pliers, leather punches, and metal picks, there are tool-holding loops of all types and sizes. There are devices like storage jars, wire baskets, and cups to help you store things that don't lend themselves to hanging up, such as bulky tools and raw materials. There are rods for holding paper towels and spools of thread and ribbon. And there are even hooks that can accommodate wine bottles, though this might make your organizer a little tipsy.