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This $10 Mail Organizer Is the Key to Organizing Your Kitchen’s Messiest Problem

Shifrah Combiths
Shifrah Combiths
With five children, Shifrah is learning a thing or two about how to keep a fairly organized and pretty clean house with a grateful heart in a way that leaves plenty of time for the people who matter most. Shifrah grew up in San Francisco, but has come to appreciate smaller town life in Tallahassee, Florida, which she now calls home. She's been writing professionally for twenty years and she loves lifestyle photography, memory keeping, gardening, reading, and going to the beach with her husband and children.
published Mar 10, 2021
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Credit: Sarah Crowley

Some housekeeping pain points seem so unsolvable that we’ve just about accepted them as facts of life. For me, one of these is the always-growing laundry mountain monster that I can’t ever quite tame. I have also not found a solution to how to hang and store my wet dishwashing rag. I keep it slung over the divider of the sink, but I don’t love how it looks, it never really has a chance to dry there, and washing hands over it doesn’t seem to be the most sanitary. 

Food storage lids are another organizing head-scratcher. I keep our food storage containers in an upper cabinet, so nifty solutions like this one aren’t possible. I’ve been using a shelf riser to stack our lids above the containers, but if I make one wrong move, I run the risk of all the lids tumbling down. So there’s a lot of shuffling and sliding and, well, my food storage container usage isn’t quite as straightforward and frustration-less as I’d like it to be. 

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But there’s another answer to my (and your!) cabinets’ messiest problem and it involves an office organization solution: a mail holder. I get a thrill out of organizing tools doing double duty in different areas of the home, and if you too have a container lid situation, you’ll enjoy this as well. 

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Just pick up this mail holder (or something similar) and use Command Hooks to hang it against the back of a cabinet door (upper or lower, it’s up to you!). And there you go. You have the perfect place to stash your food container lids! If you have a robust collection of food storage containers, and therefore lids, you may even want to hang two mail organizers. 

Storing your lids in a mail organizer is pretty self-explanatory, but here’s one tip that could enhance usability: Making sure to store larger, taller lids toward the back and the smaller lids in front. This way, you can always see everything that’s in there at a glance and you can — at last — reach for exactly (and only) the lid you need. 

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How do you organize your food storage container lids? Leave your brilliant tips in the comments below.

This post originally ran on Kitchn. See it there: This $10 Mail Organizer Is the Key to Organizing Your Kitchen’s Messiest Problem

Filed in:
Kitchen