How To Get New Life Out Of Your Old Breadbox

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We're crazy for inventive storage solutions for our cooking space, such as stashing a lazy Susan in the fridge as a kitchen organization tool. Recently, however, an Instagram influencer turned us on to an ingenious new way to stash kitchen odds and ends ... and, best of all, you probably already have the means to do it. Some social media denizens have used a rolltop bread box to store vitamins and supplements, decluttering their kitchen countertops and containing all those unsightly bottles. Honestly, we're a bit obsessed, because we see limitless opportunities here.

There's no need to stop at storing medicine bottles in bread boxes. Your cache of spice jars, which are one of the hardest spots in your kitchen to keep clean, will be accessible and yet unseen when you line them up in a bread box. Trisha Yearwood stored her butter in a handy drawer on the set of her cooking show, but you could easily protect your countertop sticks of Kerrygold from ambient ick by containing them this way. If it sounds like we're overexcited and need to slow down, consider this: bread boxes come in a variety of styles, finishes, and degrees of fanciness to suit almost any kitchen décor. They are pleasing to look at, which means that you need not stop at kitchen storage with this hack. In fact, your boring old bread box could be put to work in almost any room in the house.

In your living room, a cute farmhouse-style bamboo bread box with a window wouldn't look out of place — unless you hate trendy rustic décor, that is — and can be pressed into service holding your stray remotes, coasters, and tangle of miscellaneous charging cords. Got a bit of white paint? A classic wooden rolltop bread box can sit atop a counter or toilet tank in the bathroom and do a bang-up job holding anything from toothbrushes to bar soap to perfume bottles to your skincare accoutrements. On your dresser in your bedroom, it provides a cute, neutral shelter for jewelry, haircare tools, or bottles of lotion.

If you don't already have a breadbox you aren't using for bread, you have several cost-effective options to get yourself set up with our favorite new home hack. Thrift stores are always long on surplus kitchen accessories, and we bet that you could source a prime bread box from your local Salvation Army or Goodwill shop. Garage and yard sales are another place where people might try to part with something big and unwieldy like a perfectly fine bread box that simply doesn't suit their needs.