The Kitchenware You Should Never Store Near Your Stove

Though most of us view our homes as safe havens, more than half of all preventable injury deaths happen at home (via MoneyGeek). This may be because we tend to be more relaxed at home, and therefore a bit more careless — especially in the kitchen. All it takes is one serious burn to learn the dangers of using an oven mitt with wet hands, or a small kitchen fire to understand the importance of properly-stored kitchenware. After all, no one wants to end their day with a 911 call and a casserole dish full of Homeroom's ultimate mac and cheese ruined by fire extinguisher residue.

Fortunately, avoiding disasters like this is as simple as keeping all fabric kitchenware far away from your stove, toaster, air fryer, and any other appliance with superheated surfaces. While it's convenient to keep pot holders or oven mitts close by when pulling a delicious casserole made with leftover fries out of the oven, or to have tea towels handy for cleaning up small messes (though there are messes a fabric towel should never touch), hanging them above your stovetop or on your oven door handle are both big no-nos.

Hanging flammable items over a heat source is always a bad idea, because there's always a risk that item could fall onto the heat source and catch fire. The same goes for towels looped over an oven door handle — there's always a chance the end of the towel could get caught inside the oven without you noticing, and burst into flame.

The paradox of storing fabric items like oven mitts and tea towels is that it's unsafe to store them near heat sources, but we often need them to insulate our skin when handling hot items. That means it's important to keep them close enough to grab in a pinch without risking them touching an exposed burner or open flame when left unattended. The simplest solution for this problem is to dedicate a cabinet drawer next to your oven for these items, making sure to tuck them safely away again after you've used them.

If any of your fabric kitchen items get wet or soiled during use, it's tempting to simply toss them onto the stovetop, but this is a mistake, as burners could still be hot enough to ignite the fabric. Instead, keep a small laundry basket in your kitchen just for such items, allowing you to continue cooking in the immediate, and wash stains and odors out of your tea towels and pot holders later. You can even hang a plastic basket on the wall for this purpose, keeping both your floors and counters clear.

For those with particularly small kitchens who rely on hooks and other space-saving hacks, you may want to try placing hooks and clips on the inside of a cabinet door. This keeps your oven mitts and pot holders within easy reach, but protects them from falling onto hot surfaces should the hooks or clips fail.