We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Keeping your kitchen’s drawers and cabinets free from clutter is an important step for increasing the functionality of your home. The small items in these spaces, however, can often be quite a hassle to deal with. Your plastic food storage containers are one such example. They come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and they often don’t stack together neatly. The key to keeping them organized, as it turns out, is finding a way to prevent their lids from becoming a jumbled mess. One way you can do this is by sorting them with the help of an old CD holder. The narrow notches on the CD holder will hold the lids up vertically so that they’re easy to thumb through. That way, you’ll spend less time rooting around in your drawer for a pair of matching container components the next time you’re putting away the dinner leftovers.

What makes this container lid organization trick so ingenious is how well it reuses an item that’s not really a necessity in modern houses anymore. If you already have an unused CD holder at home, it won’t cost you a dime to try this hack out for yourself. And if you don’t have such a fixture lying around, there’s a pretty good chance that you could find one for a relatively low cost at your local thrift shop. By keeping your container lids tidy, you’ll find it easier than ever to get the most out of your deep kitchen drawers.

CD case holders come in many different sizes and can be made from a variety of materials. If you’re going to use such a fixture for container lid storage, make sure you’re selecting one that’s easy to wipe clean. Once you’ve found your holder, you’ll want to come up with a plan for how to organize it. To make it easier to locate individual lids, you could try arranging them by size within your CD holder so that the largest lids are all on one side of the fixture and the smaller ones are situated on the opposite end. Alternatively, sort the container lids by how often you use them so that the ones you reach for most frequently are all in one area. You can also try using a clever decluttering trick that’ll help keep your kitchen drawers organized to get rid of the lids you don’t use anymore. Whenever they don’t have a matching box, there’s no reason to keep them around.

If you’d prefer not to use a CD holder for combating container clutter, or if you can’t find such a fixture at the thrift shop, you can just purchase a dedicated lid organizer instead. A YouCopia StoraLid Organizer for Kitchen Cabinet Storage, for example, should work perfectly. It’s adjustable, so it won’t take up any unnecessary space. And even though it’s relatively inexpensive, it’s one of those small, unexpected items that could instantly upgrade your kitchen.