Pre-work before the 30 minute fridge tidy
Hello friends! I hope you enjoyed last week’s pantry refresh and felt inspired to have a go at rejigging your own pantry. If so, I’d love to hear from you with some pics of your amazing, freshly organised, functional pantry - you can share them with me over on Facebook, or even email them to me at beks@decluttering.co.nz. I would genuinely love to see how you got on.
But as with many things in life - that is in the past and we must move on to focus on the present… Haha that is very philosophical for an organisation blog! Pantries are soooooo last week - this week it is all about the fridge, baby! This will be a short post to let you know what you need to do in preparation for your fridge rejig. Remember - this is 30 minutes or less, so very easy for everyone to achieve with a bit of a plan up your sleeve and the right tools at your fingertips.
Before you get started, I recommend you do the following:
Take stock of what you have. The purpose isn’t to write a grocery list, we’re trying to mentally “group” what you regularly have in your fridge. Are you a cheese fiend, for example? The queen of condiments? Are you a meal prepper? Thinking critically about what usually lives in your fridge will help you know which containers you are going to need for optimal organisation (more on that shortly).
Remember how we kept “like with like” in the pantry refresh? We’re going to achieve the same thing with the fridge. By the end of this quick process, your cheeses will live in harmony in one place, as will your yoghurt, condiments, and so on (respectively - not together! It would be madness to store the condiments with the cheese, hahah).
Measure! This is an important step - you want to make sure anything you purchase will actually fit in the fridge.
Prepare/purchase your containers. If you already have fridge-safe drawers* and buckets, great - if not you’ll need to buy some. The best buys I have found for these are from Kmart (search fridge storage). We will be grouping like for like again in the drawers - so you don’t need a drawer for every single item in your fridge. E.g. A “Dairy” drawer will be great for households that only have a couple of cheese and yoghurt pottles, versus a “Cheese” drawer for households that have seven varieties of cheese on the go at all times. Choose drawer sizes appropriate for what you’ll be using them for. No point in a condiment queen purchasing small narrow drawers as the sauces probably won’t fit.
Have a good clean out. When I say clean out, I mean literally EVERYTHING out of the fridge and onto the bench, including the stuff in the door shelves. We will come back to that stuff in the next bullet point. For now, we are cleaning the shelves - either wipe down, or if they really need it take them out completely and give them a wash with detergent. Put the shelves back in, spick and span.
Throw out anything from the fridge that has seen better days. Don’t forget to recycle as much as you can.
And that’s it - the prep work sounds like it takes a while but it really doesn’t.
* It’s important that you use fridge-safe drawers - these are specifically designed to handle the cooler temperatures of the fridge. If you use alternative plastic containers, be mindful that the materials may not last well in the fridge.
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