The One Thing I Started Doing That Immediately Made This Kitchen Cabinet Neater

A few years ago I made a very small change to the food cabinet next to my stove that immediately made it neater. It’s such a simple thing that I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t come up with the idea earlier, but now that I’ve implemented the change, I’m totally set on this new way of doing things. Here’s what I did.

After noticing how littered the bottom shelf of this cabinet had become with pepper flakes (that black and white thing on the right is a pepper mill), I unloaded everything, wiped it clean. I was just about to put the pepper mill back when it hit me:

I didn’t need to live this way. My pepper mill didn’t need to live this way.

I sat my pepper mill down in a shallow bowl. And I became so insanely proud of myself.

Storing the pepper mill in a small bowl or ramekin would contain the flakes and keep the shelf clean and tidy. I already do this for my honey jar (which we’ve recommended before) to keep honey from dripping all over the shelf, so you would have thought that I’d have the common sense to apply the same principle to my pepper grinder.

And yet, it took years of owning a pepper mill to make this connection. Go, me!

The upside to this is that it’s a good reminder of how we all occasionally suffer from glaring blindspots to solutions right in front of us. This was my example.

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What about you? Have you ever had any brilliant — yet maybe obvious — solutions to little kitchen problems?