7 Budget-Friendly Paper Towel Storage Hacks You'll Wish You Knew Sooner

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Whether you're saving a buck, stockpiling for the end times, or just cleaning up lots of spills, odds are you buy a lot of paper towels. Those Costco packs holding 17 square miles of paper towel will need to go somewhere when you finally get all those unbagged groceries home and put away. You'll stick them in a pantry or closet, under the stairs, or in the garage, and probably in the original plastic bale they came in. It will be a minor inconvenience every time you have to retrieve a new roll. But luckily, there are easy, budget-friendly hacks for sneaking extra storage into your home – from storing paper towels in a dedicated drawer to repurposing items like pantry dispensers and shoe racks.

Americans aren't great about tolerating minor inconveniences. According to The Atlantic, the U.S. spends almost as much as the entire rest of the world on paper towels. Perhaps we're just far, far more prone to spills, but it seems more likely to be a matter of convenience. And there's nothing wrong with that. From a certain reductionist perspective, more or less everything is a matter of convenience.

And that's our premise here. If you're going to store 17 square miles of paper towel, it should at least be convenient. New rolls should be out of the way yet easy to retrieve. Your storage space or mechanism should be easy to replenish and look at least somewhat presentable for when your in-laws are reduced to sniffing around the storage spaces for signs of character flaws. Our goal is to help with paper towel storage ideas to go with the usual pantry organization tips for an Instagram-worthy setup. 

This first hack is a combination paper towel holder and storage drawer. These drawers aren't uncommon in new kitchen cabinets, but they're also pretty easy to DIY. If you have shaker drawers, it could be as easy as removing the recessed panel, adding a divider behind where you can store extra rolls, and maybe creating a channel on either side of the dispenser compartment to hold a dowel.

When it comes to storing a lot of paper towel rolls in a pantry or closet, there are a few strategies you can use. The most space-efficient is usually to stack them vertically, and the simplest way to pull that off might be this tension rod paper towel storage trick that will keep your cabinets tidy. Once you find a tension rod (two is better) the right size for your space, simply set them up one behind the other, one paper towel roll's width from a wall. Voila! A dedicated vertical space for those rolls.

You can also use a tension rod to store rolls horizontally. The beauty of this hack is that it can help you make use of the space above your pantry door that probably isn't useful for anything right now. Simply find a tension rod that will reach wall-to-wall above the door, space it about half of a roll's length from the wall above the door, and stick the rolls up there. They'll naturally fall to a particular angle (roughly) and await your need.

Vertically strapping a couple of bungee cords to your wall to hold paper towel rolls cargo-style just requires the available space (next to your pantry door, on the inside, of course, is a great choice) and four attachment points, which could be as simple as eye screws. YouTuber Ryder in Motion fancies the idea up a bit by building a cabinet around his bungees — basically a tray affixed to the wall vertically, with holes on the top and bottom for securing bungees. The cabinet has a substantial advantage in that its sides keep the rolls from slipping left or right.

Fiddle rails are the rods that hold stuff on a boat's shelves when the vessel is tossed around by the sea. Your pantry is unlikely to get so tossed, of course, and if it happens, you won't solve anything with paper towels. But the general approach can be helpful in storing mass quantities of rolls. Build a rail for your paper towel storage shelf, then mount another rail one roll's length above the first. You can now stack rolls two high without fear of the whole thing toppling over because the captain swung too hard to starboard.

Woodworkers are gonna work wood, whether it's the simplest solution or not. But it is very often the nicest solution, and that's the case with a solution courtesy of a Router Forums user. They used their woodworking skills (presumably including a router) to build what resembles one of those soup can dispensers — but for paper towel rolls. It will hold nine rolls, and the "delivery platform" at the bottom is slightly angled to keep things rolling nicely. This thing would actually be presentable out in the open, though guests would wonder just how many paper towels you use.

A casual stroll through the Internet on any day ending in "y" will have you eventually tripping over an alternative use for those plastic over-the-closet-door shoe holders. One of the best uses for these pieces is to hold spare paper towel rolls. The only catch is making sure the compartments are large (including deep) enough to hold your preferred roll.