Get Your Kitchen Organized Fast With These Genius Mason Jar Hacks

Mason jars are great, just like any container that can easily be matched to its lid. It's the standardized lid sizes and everything they enable that make Mason jars special. Sure, the jars do all the holding, but lots of things will hold stuff, possibly even the floor if you had nothing else. But what the floor can't do is become a shaker top or a chalkboard or a dispenser or ... well, you get the idea.

Of course, there are many different Mason jar types. Some sport standard two-piece canning lids, others have plastic tops, and then there are those with vented lids for fermenting. They're all useful and interesting, but it's generally the two-piece lids that bring the most storage potential to your pantry and countertops and make it easier to organize your kitchen cabinets.

Consider the kitchen hacks you might already know, like that trick where you screw a jar lid to the underside of a shelf, put spices or whatever in the jar, and screw it into the lid, making hanging storage for your seemingly endless supply of spices (or whatever). But also consider: With a two-piece lid, you can screw the discs onto the jar, thereby keeping your Cricut vinyl "Spices Or Whatever" labels facing uniformly outward. Then, there are the many ways you could replace the lid's metal disc for practical purposes, whether you swap the top for a label to make items easier to find or add useful features like a piece of strike paper to light matches stored in the jar. It's all enabled by the two-piece lids that have a separate threaded ring.

If you have kitchen matches, which appear to be different from wood matches in that they're called "kitchen matches," then you know a sad truth: Their boxes are designed to hold 40 to 50 matches but only to strike 15 or so. Oh, you could always try to light them with a thumbnail like a fireproof cowboy, but a better approach is to seat some sandpaper or strike paper above a Mason jar lid. Fill the jar with matches, and you'll never need a cowboy again. Unless you have cows.

Replace that sandpaper with a bit of store-bought or homemade chalkboard paint, and you have a new way to label your Mason jars, assuming you store them so that you can see the lids. And then you'll have even more stuff to store, like chalk, erasers, and chalkboard paint. This solution problems itself! But seriously, this is kind of genius, especially in a situation where you can't easily see the jar's contents, like when they're organized tightly in a drawer, or tell what the stuff is (probably spices or whatever).

You're probably thinking that a strainer lid isn't about storing and organizing, it's about un-storing. But this genius strainer Mason jar lid hack brings some serious storage efficiencies to the table. Consider the stackability of these jars compared with, say, a couple of bags of flour. And think of all the space savings from having a stack of strainer rounds ready to use in place of the usual complement of chinois, strainers, colanders, and sifters. Make the strainer bits from anything food-safe that strains ... screen from a dollar-store pop screen or silicone replacement dehydrator screens.

Some things don't need to be stored in Mason jars. But kitchen twine can get quite disgusting if you don't protect it with a dispenser of some sort. You know how your hands get all messy when you're trussing poultry or wrapping a roulade and you don't want to handle your twine spool? Stick it in a jar, punch a hole in the lid, and roulade's your uncle — you can pull out as much as you need without worrying about it getting gunked up or unraveling.

Once you've seen cardboard boxes marked with radiation warning symbols, no amount of storage tomfoolery bothers you anymore. And so it is that we're not at all dizzied by the prospect of storing Mason jar lids in a Mason jar (if we find a way to store Mason jars in a lid, that will be truly impressive). You'll definitely need widemouth jars for this hack and likely a different way to store the lids for those.

When you need to store dry goods for longer than an afternoon, the original packaging can become suspect. What's with storing everything in paper bags, anyway? When you're ready to decant your cornmeal into something airtight for the long haul, reach for a Mason jar. Just snip out the salient part of the label, and trap it between the lid and ring of your two-piece lid to make your jars easy to organize. Cut it ½ inch or so larger than the lid to give yourself some material to actually trap.

The screwed-under-your-cabinet storage idea comes to us via RV and skoolie communities (those are people who live in school buses by choice, rather than to avoid truancy). Screw a lid to the underside of your kitchen cabinet, and you can twist on and store the matching Mason jar for space-saving organization. But a magnet tucked under the lid can also make the jar stick to the underside of your cabinets, if that underside is made of the right stuff ... if it's not, just glue some ferrous stainless steel under your uppers to magnetize it.

If you're worried your jars of spices or whatever will get in the way of your countertop appliances, there are other — often unused — spaces available. YouTuber Erin Payne (@ErinPayneCreative) devised just such a lid by screwing a stainless steel sheet to her cabinets and sticking a magnet in her jar lids, a clever way to organize spices in a space-starved kitchen. Some notes: Not all stainless is magnetic, shaker tops are available for Mason jars (which also come in spice-protective amber), and make sure that the magnets or hot glue you use can safely touch the spices.

Considering all the work your cupcake liners do to protect your muffin and cupcake pans from the corrupting influence of baked goods, isn't it time you put a little effort into protecting the liners themselves from being crushed in storage? Whether you have luxe tulip-shaped liners or basic kraft paper fluted cups that are indistinguishable from tiny coffee filters at a distance, no good comes from having to iron them before you bake. The solution: Store them (and many other crushable kitchen goods) in a Mason jar.

Lids? We don't need no stinkin' lids, at least not for this hack. Hot-glue some Mason jars to a lazy Susan and use them to keep your long-handled cooking implements (slotted spoons, un-slotted spoons, spatulas and turners, ladles, etc.) readily at hand as you cook. You can fancy up the assembly by wrapping the jars in rope or burlap, but we recommend a solid, hard surface that can be cleaned now and then, unless you live for the chance to clean tomato sauce off of a coil of sisal rope.