Are Your Toes in Danger...

From the Plastics Cupboard?

Kate over at Our Red House wrote recently about organising her plastics drawer.

Her post was great but unfortunately a lot of us with older kitchens often don't have the luxury of a drawer so we are using cupboards or some of that precious space in our pantry.

Unless you bought all of your plastics in one go in all likelyhood you have a mish mash of brands and therefore sizes. Seldom do they fit nicely inside each other so the idea of a nice neat stack that sits beautifully on a cupboard shelf basically never happens.

I have to say I always found it demoralising when I spent 2 hours cleaning the cupboard and I walked away from it with parts still threatening to land on my foot at a moments notice. At least I managed to organise it to the extent that the entire cupboard contents wasn't going to arrive on my foot as soon as I opened the door but it really didn't seem enough.

About 2 years ago when I had cleaned the cupboard yet again and was getting ready to walk away in defeat I had this weird idea. Ok, so I didn't have a built in drawer in the kitchen but that doesn't meant that the plastics can't be effectively contained.

You will notice that in the picture I have given above that I haven't reorganised for a while and although the left hand side is supposed to be the "round things" and the right the "square/rectangular things" its all over the place. The main thing is that while being all over the place it isn't going to land on the floor unless I decide its going to.

Although it looks like it takes up more space than just stacking the same amount of plastics I have found in reality it doesn't, in fact mostly it takes less. The space saving comes from the fact that you can make your stacks higher and if they are a bit unstable and wobbly the worst that happens is that some of it ends up on its side inside the basket. Its all easy to get out because you just pull the basket out to get to the stuff at the back rather than try and weave your hand between the stacks and squeeze what you need through knocking everything over in the process.

I personally prefer this to a deep plastics drawer as being smaller makes it easier to see and find things even if it has fallen into disorder.

Organised but half empty squares "drawer"