Introduction
Most people get overwhelmed with even the biggest French double door refrigerators. There’s always more stuff to shove inside the fridge and you end up wasting a lot of food. Overstuffing the refrigerator or stocking it incorrectly can also mess with its cooling capabilities and damage the refrigerator. If your fridge gets damaged, you can search for “refrigerator repair near me” and hire a professional to fix it. Let’s check out how you can stock the fridge optimally to avoid that problem:
The Hacks
- Hang frozen veggies with binder clips – Frozen veggies and fruits are a great boon of modern civilization. They help you stock up on nutritious greens and cook them up in your daily servings. You don’t need to worry about them going bad or about buying fresh produce every day. However, your frozen veggies do lose their freshness sometime after you open the bag. Moreover, those bags are slippery and impossible to stack.
Binder clips are an easy solution to fix this problem. You can use them to seal the freshness of the frozen food and also use them to hang the fruit and veggies bags from the shelves.
- Milk containers can be reused – If the frozen veggie bag isn’t your thing, you have other options available to you. For instance, after you empty the milk carton don’t throw it in the trash. Instead, you can widen the opening and fit smaller fruits inside. This makes stacking and storing the veggies drastically better at no extra cost. The cartons are very durable and can last you for months.
- Get some bins – You have all kinds of food in the refrigerator and its freezer compartment. The list includes everything from popsicles and candies to bags of veggies and even frozen burritos. These items are shaped very differently and don’t sit nicely together. You waste a lot of space. You can fix that by organizing them inside bins. You can buy a bunch of bins from Amazon or even use old shoe boxes after cleaning them up.
Make sure that you place food items according to their type and shape. For instance, if you fill up a bin with long veggies like carrots and round veggies like beets, there are going to be plenty of air gaps in between. Instead, you need to stack the items by size and shape to minimize those gaps and use the maximum amount of space available to you.
- Start labeling everything – Whether you share your fridge with a roommate, your family, or have it all to yourself, adding labels to items makes it easier for everyone including you to find items inside the refrigerator. No need to stand in front of the door and play guesswork while hot and humid air enters the freezer and refrigerator compartments and mess with the cooling efficiency.
When you label things, you also know when you’re running out of ingredients. You’ll be able to track the stock of frozen meat, veggies, marinades, and all the things you like to buy in bulk. You can take it up a notch by also labeling the date of purchase on perishable goods like veggies, fruits, and meat. This gives you a rough idea of when they might go bad and how soon you should use them in your meals.
- Freeze things flat – Soups, sauces, gravies and any other form of liquid takes up a lot of space when you store them in bowls or plastic bags. However, there’s an easy way around it. Let the soups and gravies cool down and fill them up in rectangular or square plastic bags. After that lay them flat inside the freezer. Once the liquid freezes and solidifies, you can put the flat plastic bag in a bin and stack it up as you go. It’s an excellent hack to save space.
- Ditch boxes – A lot of instant meals and ready-to-cook food come in boxes. However, boxes are bulky and take up unnecessary space. The best thing you can do is empty those boxes inside plastic bags and stack them in a bin. You can also strip out the name of the food and the cooking instructions and paste it into the plastic bag.
- Remove shelves from the freezer – Unless you have a French door refrigerator your freezer compartment is very small and has unnecessary shelves instead of bins or compartments. Those shelves take up unnecessary space. Sometimes they also get in the way of food storage. A big cut of meat or a tall can of food may not fit inside the freezer due to the shelves. That’s why it’s best to remove them. It can also improve airflow inside the freezer.
- Keep an inventory of the freezer – Keeping an inventory of the refrigerator is impossible unless you have a “smart refrigerator”. Unless you have AI-assisted cameras inside the refrigerator, it’s impossible to keep track of how many things are being shoved in and out on a regular basis. However, the freezer compartment is a different story.
You can start by downloading inventory sheets on the internet. Print them out and use them to keep a track of the items inside the freezer. This helps a lot when you go grocery shopping.
- Interlocking plastic organizers – Instead of shoving everything inside the freezer, you can keep it all organized with a tiny addition that takes negligible space. You can find modular plastic organizers that are sturdy and available at any local crafts store. Place them inside the freezer and arrange them according to the size of the items. You can also change their arrangement whenever you want to accommodate the changing freezer inventory.
Conclusion
Now that you know all about these freezer and refrigerator storage hacks, the items inside your fridge would always stay organized. This allows you to use the maximum amount of space without messing up the airflow. If your refrigerator still gets damaged, you can get it diagnosed by a professional by searching for “refrigerator repair near me”.