And the winner of the Smart Contest is. . .

actually, it's a tie! Liz and Stephanie submitted very smart ideas for organizing plastic containers. Read about their systems below. These smart ladies will be getting prizes from me. Congratulations and thanks for the help!
(Stephanie, please get in touch with me so I can arrange to get your prize to you!)

Liz said. . .

1. Take ALL your plastic ware out of the cabinets – ALL !!
2. Match up lids with “bottoms”
3. Throw out any that don’t match (if you have large bottoms save those for storing ones that match)
4. Yes – just chuck them (or put them in a bag for the basement – but trust me you will never find the mates)
5. Make piles of the different styles with their mates
6. Take the lids for the same style/size and rubber band them together. Stack the bottoms together. Place the lids either under the bottoms or next to the bottoms and set in the cabinet. I know you're thinking , "They will be all over the place in no time.” Actually, if you put them back each time, you're golden.
   

If they can fit put your tops and bottoms in “extra” large plastic ware bottoms (see #4)

Every few months I do a plastic ware purge. I have a large Rubbermaid® storage bin in my basements with all the mismatched lids and bottoms. A few times I’ve found the match, but not very often.

Stephanie said...

I saw your blog from the story on the Lion Brand website. I have a response to your question! I did look at the previous response, and I would like to add the following before I describe my own organization system. Make sure all of your plastic containers have a matching lid. If not, recycle the mismatched pieces if possible. A large plastic container without a lid could still be useful to keep, if it will hold a lot of food, and you could cover it with plastic wrap or tin foil when you needed to store that quantity of food. If you don't think you would do this, toss (recycle!) the container.

I have two different systems for my plastic containers, depending if they are large or small-medium sized. The large containers I stack together. I leave a small stack of the matching lids on top. I don't have more than 4 plastic bowls that I store this way.

I have a lot more small, snack-sized, and medium sized plastic containers. These are the containers I have the most trouble keeping neatly organized! At my last home, I had a whole cabinet stuffed with all of these containers, with the container and lid attached. While it was easy to find a container because the pieces were all already matched, all of the pieces were hard to stack, containers would fall out of the cabinet when I opened it, and it seemed like that cabinet was used very inefficiently.

At my new home, I came up with a better system! I use a small cabinet, about half the size or smaller than the last cabinet, to keep all of the containers stacked, but without the lids. The containers stack so much easier without the lids, and use a lot less space. I keep similar containers stacked together, and keep the smaller containers within the larger containers below them, kind of like a pyramid. The lids are not in this cabinet.

I devoted a whole drawer to my plastic container lids! This works so well for me. The lids all lie flat and fit in the drawer perfectly. I tend to reuse certain types of the plastic containers more than others, so these lids always seem to be on the top! I can find everything I need quickly, and my system is so much more organized now, despite not storing the lids and the containers together. I hope this gets you thinking about how to organize your own plastic containers better! This system is working great for me.