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Housekeeping Tips: Best Practices for a Tidy Refrigerator

A woman peers into a neatly organized refrigerator.A disorganized fridge can rapidly become a big problem. A messy fridge can, in actuality, threaten your health and budget, from forgotten leftovers to missing ingredients. The great news is that you can aptly ward off these issues by using a number of 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 remove everything out of the refrigerator, taking note of expiration dates, mold, or other signs of spoiled food as you go. Do away with anything that is past the expiration date or looks hideous. For leftovers or food in plastic storage containers, if you’re not definite how long it has been in there, throw it out. As for your food, it’s actually best to err on the side of caution.

With everything out of the fridge, take the time to clean its interiors thoroughly. Wash and dry all surfaces, encompassing inside drawers and bins, using hot, soapy water or a mild bleach solution. So, by doing this, you will start off 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. Even though a lot 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’ll necessitate having a system to keep track of when it was added to the fridge and when it will need to be thrown out.

One effective tip is to use a dry-erase marker to write the dates of meals and takeout on the container. You could bring about 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 secure 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, mainly fruits, vegetables, and even small condiment jars, can be certainly difficult. Look at using clear storage bins to group loose items together to prevent clutter and totally ensure you have everything you need. Anyhow, take into account investing in 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 moreover 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 substances so much better.

Develop a System

As you start out replacing items, it’s critical to develop a system for storing everything. This has two benefits: first, you will, at all times, know where things are, and second, it can make your food last longer and be safer. For illustration, consider that a few specific items should be kept in certain places.

Meat should constantly be kept on the lowest shelf to avoid dripping and contaminating other food. Additionally, never store milk in the fridge door – it can spoil straight away when exposed to warm air many times. You can, moreover, separate your fruits and vegetables and use trays for tousled items to prevent spills.

Plan Ahead

Whenever your fridge is clean and organized, the vital thing you can work on is a plan to keep it that way. Even the most organized fridge will need to be thoroughly cleaned, and old items thrown out every once in a while. Contemplate creating a cleaning schedule to secure that your fridge stays organized. Like, 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 undertaking this routine as scheduled, you can avoid the dreaded deep-clean and purge of your fridge (and freezer), a job very few delight in.

By adhering to these worry-free pointers, you can keep your fridge clean and organized week after week with less hard work than you thought more likely!

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