I Finally Found a Smart Way to Store Food Container Lids, and It’s Unexpectedly Perfect
Some housekeeping pain points seem so unsolvable that we’ve just about accepted them as facts of life. For me, one of these is the always-growing Laundry Monster that I can’t ever quite tame. I have also not found a solution to how to hang and store my wet dishwashing rag. I keep it slung over the divider of the sink, but I don’t love how it looks, it never really has a chance to dry there, and washing hands over it doesn’t seem to be the most sanitary.
Food storage lids are another organizing head-scratcher. I keep our food storage containers in an upper cabinet, so nifty solutions like this one aren’t possible. I’ve been using a shelf riser to stack our lids above the containers, but if I make one wrong move, I run the risk of all the lids tumbling down. So there’s a lot of shuffling and sliding and, well, my food storage container usage isn’t quite as straightforward and frustration-less as I’d like it to be.
But there’s another answer to my (and your!) cabinets’ messiest problem and it involves an office organization solution: a mail holder. I get a thrill out of organizing tools doing double duty in different areas of the home, and if you too have a container lid situation, you’ll enjoy this as well.
Just pick up this mail holder (or something similar) and use Command Hooks to hang it against the back of a cabinet door — upper or lower, it’s up to you! (I happened to have a mesh one laying around but you can get a plastic one for even less money.) And that’s it. You have the perfect place to stash your food container lids! If you have a robust collection of food storage containers, and therefore lids, you may even want to hang two mail organizers.
Storing your lids in a mail organizer is pretty self-explanatory, but here’s one tip that could enhance usability: Making sure to store larger, taller lids toward the back and the smaller lids in front. This way, you can always see everything that’s in there at a glance and you can — at last — reach for exactly (and only) the lid you need.
This post originally published on The Kitchn. Read it there: This $9 Mail Organizer Is the Key to Organizing Your Kitchen’s Messiest Problem
