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Housekeeping Tips: Best Practices for a Tidy Refrigerator

A woman peers into a neatly organized refrigerator.A disorganized fridge can easily become a big problem. A messy fridge can certainly threaten your health and budget, from forgotten leftovers to missing ingredients. The terrific news is that you can easily keep these issues off by using several 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. Properly get everything out of the refrigerator, keeping an eye for expiration dates, mold, or other signs of spoiled food as you go. Discard anything that is past the expiration date or looks nasty. For leftovers or food in plastic storage containers, if you’re not really sure how long it has been in there, throw it out. As concerns your food, it’s excellent to err on the side of caution.

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

Label Everything

The next step to an organized fridge is to keep an inventory of how long your food has been there. While it is true that most of 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 need to have a system to keep track of when it was added to the fridge and when it will need to be thrown out.

One commonly used practice is to use a dry-erase marker to write the dates of meals and takeout on the container. You could do 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 always make certain 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, like fruits, vegetables, and even small condiment jars, can be complicated. Think about using clear storage bins to group loose items together to prevent clutter and always ensure you have everything you’re looking for. Together with this, think about getting 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 that, use a dry-erase marker on the bins and storage containers to keep track of the date things were acquired. 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 products a whole lot easier.

Develop a System

As you begin replacing items, it’s principal to develop a system for storing everything. This has two benefits: first, you will, all the time, know where things are, and second, it can make your food last longer and be safer. For illustration, be mindful that certain items should be kept in certain places.

Meat should always be kept on the lowest shelf to avoid dripping and contaminating other food. Furthermore, never store milk in the fridge door – it can spoil quite easily when exposed to warm air pretty often. You can likewise separate your fruits and vegetables and use trays for those messy items to prevent spills.

Plan Ahead

When your fridge is clean and organized, the main thing you can bring about is a plan to keep it that way. Even the most organized fridge will need to be totally cleaned, and old items thrown out now and then. Regard creating a cleaning schedule to check that your fridge stays organized. Like, in particular, you could opt for a day of the week or month to go through everything, rotating and updating your fresh produce and wiping down fridge surfaces. By working on this habitually, you can avoid the dreaded deep-clean and purge of your fridge (and freezer), a task very few enjoy.

By applying these effective tips, you can keep your fridge clean and organized week after week with less struggle than you thought possible!

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