How to Reuse an Old Metal Cookie Baking Sheet in Interesting Ways

Cookie sheets seem to multiply around our house. I’m not sure where they come from, but we have at least four or five of them at any given time. Really, we only need one – maybe two at the most – but they continue to show up. If you are like me and wonder what to do with all of your extra little cookie baking friends, you might want to give some of these ideas a try.

Serving Tray

Cookie sheets make wonderful serving trays for breakfasts, hanging as decorations, or as trays for displaying bath supplies, perfumes, and dresser items. They also make nice gifts. If your cookie sheet has any rust on it, remove it by buffing it with some steel wool. Once all of the rust is removed, it can be sealed with primer and then painted or decorated.

Use acrylic paints to decorate your tray. You can also use magazine clippings. It’s not as cheesy looking as it sounds. I like to clip photographs of flowers, especially roses. They give items a nice Victorian look when you use them for decoupage.

Rhinestones can also make a tray interesting and fun, especially for young girls and teenagers. Just glue rhinestones of their favorite colors around the edges of the tray after painting and decorating it. Once your tray is finished, seal it with a clear acrylic sealant to protect the design and any rhinestones you may have glued on.

Save Your Floors

Sometimes a refrigerator will leak if it’s a particularly humid day or there is a little extra condensation. Usually, this leaking will be caught in a tray in the bottom of the refrigerator, but too often I have had these trays leak. You can help to protect your floor by sliding a cookie sheet under your refrigerator. If your fridge leaks, it won’t get onto your floors and cause damage.

Use It for Crafts

Save a cookie tray to use for kids’ crafts. It can be used under finger paintings to keep little ones from pushing their painty fingers off the edges of the paper and onto the table. Cookie sheets are also a great place to dump out beads, buttons, crayons, markers, and other collections of small items.

You can also use it as a workspace for your own crafts. It makes cleanup quick and easy because you don’t have to put all of the individual craft supplies away, you can just pick up the whole tray and store it temporarily until you are ready to work on your craft again.

Use it For Pets

Keep a cookie sheet under your pet’s food dish to keep water and food spills off of your floors. When dirty, they can simply be put into the dishwasher, cleaned, and used again.

Keep Your Oven Clean

If you have an oven that does not have a heating element on the bottom, you can keep a cookie sheet in the bottom of your oven to catch food spills. It will save you a lot of time and hassle when it comes time to clean your oven.