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Housekeeping Tips: Best Practices for a Tidy Refrigerator

A woman peers into a neatly organized refrigerator.A disorganized fridge can hastily become a big problem. A messy fridge can actually threaten your health and budget, from forgotten leftovers to missing ingredients. The positive news is that you can conveniently prevent these conflicts by using certain simple organizational strategies. Keeping your fridge organized makes the most of your available space and keeps everything fresh and ready to eat.

Clean and Sort

The first step to organizing a fridge is cleaning and sorting all your items. Mindfully get everything out of the refrigerator, checking for expiration dates, mold, or other signs of spoiled food as you go. Clear out anything that is past the expiration date or looks shitty. For leftovers or food in plastic storage containers, if you’re not definitely sure how long it has been in there, throw it out. As far as it concerns your food, it’s suitable to err on the side of caution.

With everything out of the fridge, take the time to clean its interiors conscientiously. Wash and dry all surfaces, including inside drawers and bins, putting into service hot, soapy water or a mild bleach solution. In that regard, you will start out with a clean fridge for your new organization system.

Label Everything

The subsequent step to an organized fridge is to keep an inventory of how long your food has been there. While particular pre-packaged foods will come with an expiration or sell-by date on them, for fruits and veggies or food that you bring home or that is leftover from meals, you should have a system to keep track of when it was added to the fridge and when it will need to be thrown out.

One suitable and effective tip is to use a dry-erase marker to write the dates of meals and takeout on the container. You could carry out the same thing for other perishables inside of your fridge. By noting both when you brought them home and when they need to be used, you can ascertain that you are using up the groceries you buy before they spoil and avoid eating leftovers that can make you sick.

Use Containers

Keeping loose items tidy in a fridge, just like fruits, vegetables, and even small condiment jars, can be a pain. Mull over using clear storage bins to group loose items together to prevent clutter and really make sure you have everything you’re looking for. Likewise, contemplate obtaining quality reusable food storage containers with tight-fitting lids. This can help you store food safely and reduce waste by reusing your containers often.

You can, on top of everything else, use a dry-erase marker on the bins and storage containers to keep track of the date things were gotten. Using bins and storage containers in your fridge will free up space for more oversized items elsewhere and make tracking the expiration dates of perishable stuff a lot easier.

Develop a System

As you get going with replacing items, it’s salient to develop a system for storing everything. This has two benefits: first, you will often know where things are, and second, it can make your food last longer and be safer. By way of example, put in mind that particular items should be kept in particular places.

Meat should generally be kept on the lowest shelf to avoid dripping and contaminating other food. Aside from that, never store milk in the fridge door – it can spoil right off when exposed to warm air frequently. You can secondly separate your fruits and vegetables and use trays for those rather messy items to prevent spills.

Plan Ahead

Once when your fridge is clean and organized, the excellent thing you can undertake is to plan to keep it that way. Even the most organized fridge will need to be cleaned up, and old items will be thrown out periodically. Evaluate creating a cleaning schedule to ascertain that your fridge stays organized. To cite an instance, you could take a day of the week or month to go through everything, rotating and updating your fresh produce and wiping down fridge surfaces. By acting upon this regularly, you can avoid the dreaded deep-clean and purge of your fridge (and freezer), a job very few are crazy about.

By keeping these no-sweat guidelines, you can keep your fridge clean and organized week after week with less effort than you thought at all possible!

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Originally Published on Nov 12, 2021

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