Organize Your Jam-Packed
Refrigerator
♦Before or as you organize your
refrigerator, also clean your refrigerator. Clean one shelf per day. Today pull
out the deli meat compartment or a vegetable bin and wash it in the sink.
Tomorrow temporarily move everything from the top shelf to the second shelf and
wipe it with a clean wet cloth.
♦Work from
top down; dirt and crumbs will fall to the next shelf as you clean.
♦Transfer expired food products from each refrigerator shelf
into the trash. If you plan to to do a thorough cleaning, you may want to wait
until the day before grocery shopping day---when you have the least amount of
food in the fridge. You also may want to pack and ice chest full of blue ice and
store your items in there while you wash the fridge. That way no food will spoil
as the temperature rises in your refrigerator while you're cleaning it. (Tip:
turn it up higher so it'll cool faster and cooler and you can get the food from
the ice chest back in sooner.)
♦Since
you've gotten rid of the expired items before you cleaned the fridge, now you
can cluster remaining items into categories in your refrigerator for easy
location in the future. And once you decide on a place for a cluster (e.g.
ketchup and mustard) always keep it in that same spot.
♦Put meats
defrosting on the lowest bottom solid shelf (to keep any juices from leaking
onto other products and making you sick as well as making a mess).
♦Cluster condiments and sauces
together on a door shelf (e.g. ketchup, barbecue sauce, teriyaki sauce).
♦Or put them in rolling bins or
rollout shelves or caddies on middle shelves in the refrigerator. That way you
can easily pull forward or out one of the slim, rectangular bins or flat trays
to get an item you want (versus reaching over the three bottles in front of the
one you want and knocking them over.) The Rubbermaid tray pictured to the
left has been out of stock for a while, so it's not offered here except as an
example.
♦Walter Drake sells these rolling bins for the refrigerator:
You may want to improvise a similar concept by using a rectangular Rubbermaid
plastic ice cube bin meant for the freezer.
♦Organize.com also sells this
Refrigerator Turntable
that can hold and rotate cans, bottles and containers. Put it near the middle or
back top corner of the fridge to make easier and wiser use of this space. This
is it pictured below. If this one is out of stock, check
Stacks and Stacks ,
which also sells it. Just search their site with the term "refrigerator".
♦If you store soda cans in the refrigerator (or even in the pantry), this wire
can holder dispenser from Organize-Everything will hold two types of sodas
side-by-side--so two people in the family can easily access their soda if one
prefers regular diet soda and another caffeine free soda.
♦If you need help organizing your freezer, try this
freezer organizer.
♦Need some
Fridge Tape
 . Stacks and Stacks sells this.
This is magnetic tape that sticks to the back of your item and then to your
fridge.
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