This Organization Hack Will Make Your Freezer A Sight For Sore Eyes

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In our kitchens, space is forever at a premium. It's not for nothing that we have covered the clever reason to add a shoe hanger to your pantry (it accumulates small items that would otherwise become clutter!) and the best order to store food in your fridge, just for starters. One of our major organizational bugbears, however, is actually right next door to the fridge. Our freezers are a constant struggle to keep in order, largely because various bags, boxes, and packages have a tendency to end up stuffed in every available square inch, making the door hard to close and individual items all but impossible to find.

Recently, we discussed the reasons you should declutter your freezer with the storage hack of placing bags flat, but today, we're taking things a step further. Organize all the miscellaneous items in your freezer with see-through plastic bins and never lose that bag of diced ham you purchased for fried rice ever again! We like this six-pack of clean bins by YIHONG for a combination of function and price, but any plastic bins you pick up online or in the store will do. You should buy bins depending on the dimensions of your own freezer and what you plan to put in them. Some ideas: lining up TV dinners for grabbing an easy lunch, stacking bags of topple-prone veggies, or organizing your packages of frozen meat based on when you need them for weekly dinner prep.

Anyone who owns a chest freezer knows that it can feel like the worst thing to try and organize, no matter how devoted you might be to maintaining order. Buying stackable clear bins is the real deal, the storage solution you have long sought to bring order to your deep freezer. A good rule of thumb is to place bigger bins on the bottom and stagger smaller ones on the top so that you still have clear sight lines of what's going on inside your storage. Better yet, use a dry erase marker or masking tape to label the outside of the bins with what's inside and possibly even expiration dates. Your days of wasting food because you couldn't find it when needed are behind you! This eight-pack of stackable bins by Heyuzb will help you impose order on even the most hopeless chest freezer.

If you have a deep freezer, a good practice is to "rotate" your stock every time you shop, making sure that the newest items go towards the bottom and the oldest food (that is, the stuff closest to expiring) sits near the top where you can grab it most efficiently. This is a little bit of work, sure, but, combined with your plastic bins, good maintenance habits will ensure that food waste and frustration are relics of the past.