Maximize Your Kitchen Space With This Genius Container Lid Storage Hack

Difficulty organizing and finding storage container lids is such a ubiquitous problem that it's become a sort of shared inside joke among many home cooks. Everyone knows the feeling of opening a cabinet only to be surprised by a deluge of plastic rectangles clattering to the floor, or rifling through a drawer unable to find the single item you actually need. Some even joke that dryers and kitchen cabinets are in cahoots — for every single sock that disappears, a new lid without a corresponding container ends up in your cabinets.

Despite best efforts, even kitchens beautifully organized with a label maker have this problem. You can label where the containers and lids are stored, but matching them up when necessary is entirely its own animal. Not to mention loose lids can take up a ton of space. Fortunately, there's a fairly simple storage hack that can not only help you keep all of your lids in one small area, but also make it much easier to sort through them and find what you need when you need it.

All you need is a wire cooling rack or dish drying rack with enough slots to accommodate all of your lids and a plastic basket large enough to easily hold the rack. Just place the rack on top of the basket, and slide your lids into the slots — it's truly that easy. Think of it as a kind of filing system for your storage container lids. You may even be able to fit several of the same type in one slot to save room if you have a fairly large collection of storage containers.

Of course, like any organizational hack, this isn't a one-size-fits-all solution — it's a starting point to help you free up cabinet space to give your novelty mugs room to breathe and more easily store leftover pork for making a delicious stir-fry. The most notable issue with this hack is the risk of the cooling or drying rack toppling off of the plastic basket, which could make your new setup clunky and annoying to use.

A permanent solution would be a few dabs of hot glue in the corners of the basket, making it much easier to move around. However, if you'd like to be able to use the rack and basket separately in the future, you can secure them together with binder clips where the rack sits parallel to the basket's edge. Using binder clips also makes it much easier to take your organizer apart to wash or dust it, ensuring that your lids remain squeaky clean. It also avoids the issue of retrieving any smaller lids that slip from between the slots into the bottom of the basket — you can just unclip the rack and grab any loose lids.

The final thing to think about is where to store your lids once you've corralled them. Any open shelves in your kitchen are best used for organizing your favorite cookbooks or displaying pretty dishes. Instead, try sliding your lid storage basket into a deep drawer or nestling it in the same cabinet as your storage containers.