This $9 Mail Organizer Is the Key to Organizing Your Kitchen’s Messiest Problem

updated May 6, 2021
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Credit: Sarah Crowley

Some housekeeping pain points seem so unsolvable that we’ve just about accepted them as facts of life. For me, one of these is the always-growing Laundry Monster that I can’t ever quite tame. I have also not found a solution to how to hang and store my wet dishwashing rag. I keep it slung over the divider of the sink, but I don’t love how it looks, it never really has a chance to dry there, and washing hands over it doesn’t seem to be the most sanitary. 

Food storage lids are another organizing head-scratcher. I keep our food storage containers in an upper cabinet, so nifty solutions like this one aren’t possible. I’ve been using a shelf riser to stack our lids above the containers, but if I make one wrong move, I run the risk of all the lids tumbling down. So there’s a lot of shuffling and sliding and, well, my food storage container usage isn’t quite as straightforward and frustration-less as I’d like it to be. 

But there’s another answer to my (and your!) cabinets’ messiest problem and it involves an office organization solution: a mail holder. I get a thrill out of organizing tools doing double duty in different areas of the home, and if you too have a container lid situation, you’ll enjoy this as well. 

Credit: Sarah Crowley

Just pick up this mail holder (or something similar) and use Command Hooks to hang it against the back of a cabinet door — upper or lower, it’s up to you! (I happened to have a mesh one laying around but you can get a plastic one for even less money.) And that’s it. You have the perfect place to stash your food container lids! If you have a robust collection of food storage containers, and therefore lids, you may even want to hang two mail organizers. 

Storing your lids in a mail organizer is pretty self-explanatory, but here’s one tip that could enhance usability: Making sure to store larger, taller lids toward the back and the smaller lids in front. This way, you can always see everything that’s in there at a glance and you can — at last — reach for exactly (and only) the lid you need. 

How do you organize your food storage container lids? Leave your brilliant tips in the comments below.

Credit: Sarah Crowley