7 Clever Ways To Organize Deep Cabinets Without Bins Or Lazy Susans

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The usual strategies for making deep cabinets more useful — bins and lazy Susans — aren't ideal for every situation. Bins, for example, can give you deeper access but often at the expense of vertical space-efficiency, and lazy Susans lose space in the corners just by virtue of their shape. But there are many other solutions, like slide-out shelves and door hangers, that can help make your space more usable, and sometimes even make it hold more.

Visibility and access are usually the key issues with deep cabinets, along with failure to make the most of vertical space. The best solutions tend to either reorganize your cabinets to take better advantage of vertical space or allow you to move all the contents at once so that you can access everything from the top. Neither solution helps much with using space more efficiently (and tiered risers often make some space completely inaccessible, but as organizational tools, they get the job done by helping you keep everything to hand as well as possible).

What's great about this hack is that it's so obvious, but no one ever does it. Basically you're replicating the functionality of those off-the-shelf tiered risers designed to make things in the back of a cabinet higher than the things in the front, stadium seating-style. This can be accomplished by cutting sheets of wood — the size of the lumber depends on your needs — to fit in your cabinets, and building the riser up as needed. It's also a pretty modular solution.

If the DIY riser approach doesn't work for you, you can always buy risers at many home and department stores and, of course, on Amazon. The trick here is measuring everything carefully so that your store-bought risers suit your needs as well as the custom DIY ones would. An Oizeir 3-tier spice rack similar to the ones pictured here costs $15.99, but they can easily reach $60 or more.

This bit of genius might be super-easy, depending on the depth of your cabinets and the depth of whatever builder-grade wire shelves, commonly used in closets and pantries, you can put your hands on. If all goes well (or if you support it at the back), the wire shelf fits at a gentle angle with a lip on the front that's perfect for storing canned goods. When you pull the front can out, the rest roll to the front. Best of all, this hack is cheap or free since everyone's upgrading their tired, dated wire closet shelves.

Reshuffling the available space in a deep cabinet isn't easy, but one method makes it both simple and often far better. Pulling items out of the cabinet and attaching them to the back of the door effectively uses the space in the very front of the cabinet, but moves that stuff out of the way when you open the cabinet. Flat objects, like snack bag packages and oven mitts, will fit here perfectly.

These little stand units subdivide the vertical space in your cabinets so that it can be used more efficiently. You can even get ones that are custom-made for tricky deep corner cabinets. They come in a huge variety of materials, sizes, and prices, averaging around $20 — less than you'd typically pay for a smaller spice rack riser — and you can save by picking up a multi-pack like this Amazon Basics cabinet shelf for $24.99.

Slide-outs shelves are a smarter way to organize deep cabinets and are a staple strategy for dealing with inefficient cabinets. They work for items that are hard to retrieve from within the cabinets, and they effectively erase the cabinets' depth so that you can access everything easily. Slide-outs come in a large range of sizes, shapes, and materials; critically, they also vary wildly in terms of their weight capacity, so keep an eye on that for storing heavy foodstuffs. They don't do much for vertical space usage, but we have some ideas on that, too.

Pot lid and baking sheet organizers (also known as file folder organizers) are genius for storing lots of things by holding them upright, maximizing vertical space. Having these organizers more than one layer deep in a cabinet would usually be out of the question, but with slide-outs, it's a no-brainer. The Umbra Peggy cabinet organizer ($24.99) lets you locate pegs on a pegboard tray, giving you lots of customizability. There's also a clever Dollar Tree trick for keeping container lids organized that would work great with slide-outs.