Stop The Cabinet Clutter: The Smarter Way To Store Lids & Maximize Space

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Food storage containers are a necessity for home cooks, but keeping them organized in the kitchen is often an uphill battle. For some reason, immediate solutions for your cluttered cabinets can seem few and far between. There are plenty of products, DIY builds, and hacks out there to organize food containers, but too often, these ideas overcomplicate what should be a simple task. With a deep storage drawer and a tension rod costing as little as a few dollars, though, you can work smarter and not harder, achieving neat and affordable food container storage with just a twist of the wrist. Simply place a tension rod between two of the drawer's sides to section it off, and use one of the areas for tidy upright lid storage.

Tension rods are a small but mighty item for improving home organization, and you may even already employ a few curtain rod hacks to make life easier. To solve the clutter of containers and lids in your cabinet, you need a deep drawer that fits your food storage containers (ideally, one that's deep enough to let you stack a few) as well as your container lids when they're standing on their sides. Create a horizontal divider with the tension rod in the drawer, placing it toward the front, back, or one of the sides to make a section for the lids. This narrow section will store the container lids neatly nested sideways, maximizing usable space through the rest of the drawer.

Since the containers don't exert a whole lot of pressure on the tension rod (the lids just lean against it), you don't need a very robust model for this storage hack to work. Measure the width of your drawer, and choose a tension rod that can fit your measurement around the middle of its range to ensure it will hold strong. As long as it's a suitable length for you drawer, a product like the AIJIEGUANG Spring Tension Rod will do the trick. If you want something more substantial, curtain tension rods are usually thicker and stronger; a product like the SISELBA Spring Tension Curtain Rod is pricier at around $15 but also more robust.

Placing the container lids sideways like this has a few benefits: It saves space, avoids precarious lid piles, and makes it easier to grab the lid you need without disturbing a whole stack. You can take this idea a step further by using a couple of rods to separate several rows of container lids for better organization. It's also possible to use this idea to separate pot and pan lids or organize other kitchen products in a drawer. Best of all, since this idea uses a tension rod rather than a mounted one, it's easy to adjust and remove the tension rod if you change your mind.