Make Your Tiny Fridge Feel Twice as Big: 11 Brilliant Hacks

Watch this video from Alton Brown’s YouTube channel to watch the Good Eats guru make a brilliant connection: An empty egg carton is just the perfect thing to stash bottles of mustard and other condiments in the fridge door—it will store most bottles perfectly in upside-down harmony to ensure complete organization and maximum mustard.

If you find your food going bad before you even have a chance to eat it, the culprit might be visibility. If you can’t easily see and reach the food in the back of the fridge, you’re likely to let it go to waste. Never again! Drop a simple lazy susan on the shelf, just like you do in your cabinets, to better access all of your refrigerator.

The refrigerator form has evolved over the years to include a wide, deep freezer drawer at the bottom—great for reaching into, but not so efficiently organized. Until now, that is. The solution? Basic plastic bins. Samantha from Simply Organized used these Container Store bins to give her freezer drawer a filing system—sorting breakfast foods, veggies and oven snacks into different containers.

If after all your valiant attempts to organize your freezer, it still becomes a free-for all of half-rolled up bags, try this trick from Mom 4 Real: Use a grease pencil, chalk pen or dry erase marker to label what’s inside.

Glass bottles have a way of taking over the fridge. Lift them up—like, to the fridge ceiling—with powerful magnets that will store any bottle with a metal cap. This way, they’re plain to see, easy to reach, and leave plenty of room below for other things. You could make your own, but there’s a solution for people who would rather BIY (“buy it yourself”) than DIY: BottleLoft. A pack of two strips costs $34.99 and will store a six-pack of bottles.

For all the bottles that don’t have metal lids, you can get clever with binder clips: Attaching a pair of them to the slats of your refrigerator shelf, like here from Home Hacks, gives a pyramid of bottles a place to rest, making easy and tidy work of stacking them.

Another binder clip hack for wire shelves: The next time you clip closed a bag of frozen veggies, clip it closed around the slats of your shelf. This way, you can rack up your open bags for easy visibility—even for the almost-empty ones.

What’s your current method of sorting zip bags, stacking them in a pile or shoving them into a drawer? This Kickstarter product, Zip n Store, wants to help. It’s a pull-out shelf rack (there’s also a door version) that slips all your zipper bags in place for easy access.

Think about where the unused space is inside your fridge; it’s likely the spots right under the shelf above. This simple solution, available on Amazon, is a set of slide-on drawers that allow you to stash small items in the space just below each shelf.

Forget the adage, here’s a solution that’s as useful as it is beautiful: Jaime of Raising Up Rubies dropped a decorative wire basket into her refrigerator’s egg shelf to be able to store even more eggs in the same amount of space—while also providing a day-making cheery farmhouse vibe right inside the fridge.

Speaking of farmhouse vibes, we had to share this idea (which, surprisingly, we spotted in the website of Kor Water filtration system—that’s the source of those elegant carafes up top in the photo). Locking your veggies away in a crisper drawer might be good for their shelf life, but it’s a waste if you forget to ever eat them. Keep your fresh produce front-and-center in a rustic wooden crate, and you might just find that you reach for the healthy stuff a little more often.

Re-edited from a post originally published 9.16.2016 – TW