All those plastic pseudo-Tupperware leftover containers are quite useful, but boy, are they a pain to store and keep organized. And forget about trying to find a matching lid. Even professional organizers can’t agree about the best way to organize them. But tonight I hit upon an easy solution, which I quickly reorganized my cupboard to reflect:
1. Take all your containers out of the cupboards and find the matching lid for them. Throw away unmatched lids and containers or repurpose them as drawer organizers.
2. Take out your trusty Sharpie marker and label your first container “A” and the lid “A.” Label the next container “B” and its lid “B.” Do you see where I’m going with this? Give every container a different letter of the alphabet. If you come to “Z” and you still have containers, I encourage you to question whether you truly need more than 26 containers. If we’re being perfectly honest here, I went to the letter “Q,” and was surprised to find that I own 17 containers.
3. Take off all the lids and line them up in a box. (I use my biggest Tupperware container for that and put its lid under the box.) Nest all the square containers together, all the rectangular containers together and all the circular containers together.
4. You’re done. Now the next time you need to find a lid, it will take just a couple of seconds to look through the box of lids and find it. Obviously, the fewer the containers you have, the shorter time it will take to find its coordinating lid.
What a timesaver!
This is great! Now, do you have any advice on how to get a stubborn boyfriend to use this method rather than tossing lids in a cabinet and shutting the door really quick so that they don’t come back out on his head? lol
Oh, that is tough when you want to get/stay organized and the person you live with doesn’t care! Try reading Sandra Felton’s book When You Live With A Messie http://messies.com/products/books/when_you_live_with_a_messie_1/. Good luck!