The Dollar Tree Item To Better Organize All Those Water Bottles In Your Kitchen

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In a world riddled with trendy Stanley Quenchers and Owala tumblers in every color, a plain Nalgene water bottle is a modest investment that will pay dividends in preventing waste — it's one of our favorite alternatives to disposable plastic water bottles. We love the sleekness and minimalist aesthetic of these lightweight bottles, but, man, are they a pain to store! Whether you have a whole family's worth of bottles or simply one person with a bit of a stash, they have a tendency to be too tall for normal kitchen cabinets, knock over easily, and generally make a nuisance of themselves.

That's why we were so pumped to see social media devise what seems like the perfect, cheap solution to our little water bottle containment issue. Just like our recently-discovered hack for decluttering Tupperware lids with a napkin holder, homemaking blogs and TikTok reels show one dirt-cheap Dollar Tree purchase that solves a small-but-annoying kitchen frustration — taking a magazine holder and turning it on its side as a repurposed bottle holster. Water bottles fit perfectly and are easily stacked horizontally, eliminating space issues. You can easily slide multiple holders side-by-side for storage that compounds effortlessly in your cabinet or pantry. 

Not close to one of the nearly 8,800 Dollar Tree stores in the United States? Amazon Basics has you covered with a basic black two-pack of plastic magazine holders. They aren't $1.25 each, but they'll get the job done!

As far as we can see, one of the main downsides of storing reusable water bottles sideways in magazine holders is that some folks claim the preferred position for storing bottles is upside-down. This is so that any residual moisture from washing can effectively drain. You can get around this minor quibble by making sure your bottles dry completely on the drying rack before storing, and always stashing the lids separately from the bottles to ensure you aren't giving bacteria a nice, enclosed space to thrive. Rinsing your bottles out before filling them, especially if it's been a while since their last turn in the rotation, is another great habit to adopt.

We've seen wine racks bandied about as a great way to store water bottles, but who has the space for a whole extra wine rack in their kitchen? Holding bottles is another clever reason to add a shoe hanger to your pantry door besides storing stray packets and individual snack servings, but the height of your average water bottle doesn't really make this super effective in terms of minimizing wasted space. A lazy Susan, which is often recommended, also doesn't tackle the toppling factor. As far as we can tell, magazine holders solve the problems that other storage solutions fail to address, while also being super cost-effective.