I store a lot of my baking pans in the oven, as well as the pizza stone. They're too big to fit into my cabinets so it works out well. Just have to remember to take them out of the oven before you set it to preheat!

I don't. I guess I have enough cabinet space, even though it's a small kitchen.

I don't store anything in my oven, so it never occurs to me to check other people's ovens when I'm cooking with friends away from home. On more than one occasion I've opened a preheated oven at a friend's house only to discover it full of hot pans!

I finally gave in and am storing a bunch of cake and pie pans, cookie sheets, and a pyrex casserole dish. I also keep preheating without removing the stuff first. My kitchen has a sum total of 2 cupboards and no drawers or shelves, so it's not really an option not to use the space!

I do -- though nothing flammable or meltable.

I cook all the time, but in over a year of living in this kitchen I've only needed my oven about 3 times (holiday baking). I live alone and most of my every day baking/broiling/roasting I do in my countertop convection toaster oven. It's way faster and easier.

I store pots and pans in there and yes, I use the oven all of the time and have to take all the pots and pans out each time and pile them on the counters which gives me less prep space. I've also preheated once or twice without taking the stuff out. Thank goodness I don't store glass items in there.

Jo from Connecticut

I tried it once - and melted a spatula onto a cookie sheet I had forgotten to take out before preheating. Never again...

My mother does this all the time and it drives me CRAZY. She doesn't store stuff as much as hide dirty dishes and large plastic bowls in there. She feels like 50% of her dishes, pans and utensils cannot go into the dishwasher, but she only handwashes once a week, so rather than have her sink piled to the ceiling, she stuffs things in the oven. More than once I've turned on the oven at her house and smellled melted plastic a few minutes later.

I'd be afraid of preheating without taking things out. I don't use the oven much in the spring or summer, but in the fall / winter I do a lot of bread baking and so even just moving everything out each time I wanted to use it would be a pain!

I store my rectangular glass baking pans in the oven.

No way in the world, we use the oven almost everyday and just turn it on without checking it first. We'd end up with damaged stuff all the time. Plus, where would we put it all while we were cooking? We have very limited counter space as it is.

Occasionally I might stick clean bake ware in the oven to dry while it's still hot. But that's it. I had never heard of anyone using their oven as storage (aside from on Sex in the City) until I saw my college boyfriend's mom store boxes (paper or plastic) of pastries & doughnuts in her oven. And yes, they occasionally preheated without removing, burning and melting whatever was stored in there that day.

I can completely understand storing bake ware in the oven if you have tight kitchen space. I would just never prefer to store anything there.

I store my stoneware in the oven, it doesn't fit in my cabinets!

Just the one Pyrex lasagna dish, it's really big!

this would freak me out. i'd always think the oven would accidentally get turned on and then everything would light up or explode. but i have the whole "did i turn the stove off?" issue every time i leave my house, so...i'm a little nuts. :)

Same problem. Her I got to heat the oven and then I realize I'm actually baking some pringles or something. I don't trust myself enough.

I have a small kitchen and limited space, but I too am afraid of forgetting and preheating so I just cram things on top of each other in the cabinets. I do, however, store items on top of the stove and refrigerator.

I store my cookie sheets -- and if we have baked goods (like a pie or a pan of brownies) they usually stay in there, too.

Nothing more than that though.

I do store things in the oven, but only baking pans and my pizza stone.

When my daughter was a toddler she put the dvd remote control in the oven once. I only realized there was something wrong quite a long time after a weird smell started permeating the kitchen.

Ever since then, I have been very cautious about putting anything combustible in the oven when it's not on, so using it for ziploc bag storage probably wouldn't work for me!

i don't, myself, because if i did, i'd forget an burn whatever it was. my fiance grew up storing pizza in the oven--like, when you order pizza, and have some left over, you leave it in the box and leave the box in the oven. apparently his family somehow believes that the oven keeps the germs out?

i do have an aunt who stores things in both of her two ovens--because she's older and has a bad back and it's easier for her to get heavy pots and pans out of the ovens, which are high up, than to lean down an get them out of a low down cupboard. that said, she does a fair amount of cooking! guess it works for some people...

I bake a lot, but live in a small NYC apt. I keep my baking trays, cupcake tins, and two pans in the oven. My oven is part of my storage.

I get this from my mother, who has a very good-sized oven, but uses it for storage of similar items as well.

I visited a (rather expensive, new) condo a few months ago, and after touring the kitchen realized that...there was NO oven in the place. Apparently enough people don't use them that the builder just though "well, we'll do away with the oven and put a jumbo SubZero fridge in instead!"

I use my oven almost every day, so can't imagine using it for storage even though I have 3 cabinets total. Sometimes the cleaning lady will throw pans in there and then I'll have a surprise pile of hot stuff after preheating the oven.

I understand small space issues, and I am not judging. Having said that, is it really worth the trouble of finding a new place for everything stored in the oven each time that you want to use the oven? Where do you put the things?

i don't store anything in the oven except the pizza stone because like many people I leave it in there every time I turn the oven on unless I am using all three racks in my oven. Helps keep the temperatures a bit more even.

Although our kitchen is small, we don't store anything in our oven, but my Filipina grandmother does. She only uses the oven during the holidays when she makes roast beef or bakes a dessert, like sweet rice cake. Otherwise, she's cooking on the stovetop or using her toaster oven. Works for her!

My family used to store things like broiler and roasting pans in the oven, but don't anymore. I still habitually check any oven I use to make sure that it is empty before turning it on.

I store my iron skillets in the oven. Occasionally I forget to take them out before pre-heating, but it's no biggie. They just get better seasoned!

My mother does this and I find it such a pain to have to take everything out and find a space for it before using the oven.

Thankfully, I have enough space that I do not require the oven for storage, though even if I did I would find another solution.
Can't stand it!!!

My old kitchen was tiny and had two cabinets for pots, pans & dishes, so we stored the pizza stone & the roasting pan in the oven. I thought about storing my wood cutting board there, but given my habit for preheating and forgetting I have stuff in it, I think that's a bad idea.

It drives me nuts to see that picture!

I use my oven all the time -- baking several times a week. There's no way I could ever store anything in the oven, since I'd have to empty it out every other day.

I would love to utilize my oven as storage, but I'm an absent-minded preheater... the pic would be one charred melted mess when I was done with it.

Only my pizza stone is actually stored in the oven. I only do that because it's too big to store anywhere else. I really hate having it in there, but I don't see any other options.

I can't imagine storing flammable things in an oven. What if the oven shorts out and catches on fire quicker because of the stuff in it? Maybe that's a paranoid thought process, but you just never know.

My mother used to (maybe still does?) store all our pans in there and it drove me crazy. She rarely cooked or baked but I baked all the time (even back then in high school), and I would always preheat the oven and then have to deal with hot pans...and usually they were pans I wanted to use, so besides finding someplace to put them I had to wait for them to cool down so I could use them. I don't have a big kitchen or lots of storage, nor do I really know anyone who does, but I refuse to store things in there. And I have a ridiculous amount of baking things :-/

my boyfriend's family puts their pots and pan in the oven (even though their kitchen is big enough not to) and I thought I would try it out in my small condo.

bad idea as I forgot that I put the pots in there when I went to use the oven. Luckily everything was oven safe. I never did it again.

Growing up we had a double oven, so my mom stored the broiler pan and her cast iron skillets in one of them. It wasn't a nuisance because we only used both ovens for holidays--and we usually used those pans in that case. Having only the one oven, I don't use it for storage. I actually bought a billy bookcase with a glass door for our glassware that I keep just outside of the kitchen, just so I'd have cupboard space for my pots and pans.

I teach cooking and a former student told me a great story: "My husband does most of the cooking and I wanted to show him what I had learned. One of the mistakes I always make is that I forget to pre-heat the oven. Well not this time. But my mistake this time was not looking in the oven before pre-heating. It turns out the oven is where my husband stores the George Forman grill." I think they might have ad to replace the oven AND the George Forman grill.

I don't, but I could since I don't use the oven much. Maybe once a month, though, I'd end up with hot pans because I just know I'd never think to look before I pre-heated. So if I did store stuff in there, it would have to be oven-safe. I'd probably plonk it on the floor when I baked assuming I'd remembered to look BEFORE pre-heating.

My oven doesn't work, but I have a sizable toaster oven that is useful for most things, so the inside of the oven is for paper recycling and has been for two years.

I store my roasting pan, cast iron skillet and a broiler pan in my oven. All stuff too big/heavy to be stored in the cabinet space above my head, which is pretty much the only cabinet space in my apartment.

When I'm using my oven, the pans either sit on the side of the stovetop I'm not using, the counter, the kitchen table or when all else fails, the floor.

I'm lucky enough to rent an apartment with 2 ovens! So guess I have double the "storage" space. To me that just sounds like a fire hazard. I do use the ovens often and not even for major baking. Nachos are the best quick oven food. And I'm a boiler addict.

My grandmother used to store her potato and corn chips in her oven because she believed the pilot light kept the oven drier than the cupboards were. (After moving in with her I quickly learned to double check before turning the oven on.)

I now store my cast iron pans and my steel wok in my oven to keep them dry and free of rust.

My family used to store our cereal in the oven in those plastic cereal containers. I'd advise always telling the babysitter this before giving her the go-ahead to bake while you're away! Our poor babysitter had a literal melt-down and her father came to the rescue!

My family never did this when I was growing up, so when my rather kooky college roommate took it up, I assumed that it was one of her bizarre quirks.

No offense meant to the many here who do this. That roommate also put her keys in the microwave because she knew she would find them there.

I use my oven far more often than my dishwasher, so I use the dishwasher for storage.

We store our baking sheets, muffin pans and roasting pans in our oven and we use our oven daily. We store everything in size order and the biggest sheet is at the bottom and acts as a tray... whenever we use the oven I just take out the pile and pop it on the counter and when I am done back they go... I've always done this and thought it was standard practice!!!

If you have to store stuff in your oven then you have too much stuff. Time to minimize.

When we were selling our previous home, the realtor insisted we take everything off the countertops to make our small kitchen look bigger. With no basement or other functional storage available, we used the oven to use to store the extra appliances and kitchen items normally stored on the counter. Unfortunately, someone who looked at the house must have been playing with the dials on the stove and turned it on. When we came home after the house was shown, the whole house reeked of burnt and melted plastic and electronics. We had to throw out the stove and lost all of our small applianecs to boot. Plus, the house needed a substantial amount of airing out before the smell was gone!

I store my baking pans in the oven. We have to open our oven to check if it lit properly so we never forget to take them out whilst preheating!

I do store my cast iron skillets and my wok in the oven, only on the bottom shelf of the oven. Most of the time I don't even bother taking them out of the oven when I'm using it. They're fine. The only time this is a problem is when I'm making multiple things in one meal and suddenly decided I need to saute up some vegetables to go with the casserole I've got in the oven. Boy are those skillets hot when they come out of the oven. Like hot enough to burn my fingers even using a pot holder. I just have to remember to double up the pot holders.

I have a tiny kitchen with practically no storage and so, even though I use the oven a lot, I keep the baking sheets and pans in there.

when I take them out I put them on top of the fridge. I don't like storing things on top of the fridge full time because it just looks too cluttered.

I don't store things in the oven. That is what the dishwasher is for!

I put cast iron pans in there to dry out since I have an old stove with an open pilot. Sometimes I forget them, but I use the oven way too much to permanently store things in it.

I have a couple of close friends in the Netherlands and was so surprised to find out that in their apts. they don't have ovens at all (they have gas burners). I can understand not baking bread, cake, etc., but I don't know how I would manage without gratins, pizza, slow braises.

I keep all my pots in the oven. I have a small toaster oven on my counter that I do most of my baking in as it fits a 9" x 9" pan perfectly for casseroles. I only use the oven to bake frozen pizza that doesn't fit in the toaster oven.

As the daughter of a career fire fighter, I have a healthy fear of stupid things that can burn your house down. This is one of them. Everyone is talking about stuff melting, but someone needs to mention that everything you ever held dear including wedding pictures and oh, i dunno, your children can be lost forever because of this move.
Fires happen this way every day. Please, please if you are doing this, disconnect your oven from all power or gas sources.

My Mom stores serving platters and large pans in the ovens (yes, two). It drives me nuts to this day. Maybe that's why I didn't do much baking until after I left home? Like many others have written, I keep my pizza stone in my oven at all times, unless I need to use both racks.

I store all my baking pans in the oven, along with platters, pot lids, fancy napkins, a tray and three small flowerpots.

Most of my cooking is done on the stovetop. When I want to use the oven I pull it all out, pile it on the floor in the living room and do what I need to do.

It is one of those things that seems like a terrible hassle to people with room, but if I want to have muffin pans, that is where I have to keep them!

I can definitely see storing things in the oven, though I am forgetful enough that it's a pretty bad idea for me. My best friend growing up had two ovens in her family's kitchen, and they always used one for storage for 360 days out of the year; they only used it for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and maybe the occasional other big family gathering.

I have to say though, when I read the comment about the roommate who left her keys in the microwave... MY FACE MELTED IN HORROR. O_O;;;;