Peace of Mind Organizing

Organizing a bottom drawer freezer

28 August 2019

My husband, Barry, and I just bought a new refrigerator/freezer. For us that’s a big deal—we tend to hang onto appliances for a long time. (We still have the fridge we bought in 1992 when we bought our house, though it’s just used as a backup.) But we didn’t like the stainless steel refrigerator with a top freezer that we bought when we renovated our kitchen in 2016. It required way too much bending over to use the refrigerator and we pretty much disliked it from the very beginning.

The new refrigerator, an LG with a bottom freezer drawer, was delivered yesterday. Today I had the pleasure of organizing it! I’ve never had a freezer drawer before (nor organized one for a client), so it was a fun challenge.

I have to say, it went very well. It’s helpful that I keep a supply of containers in my home to take with me to client appointments. So I didn’t even have to go shopping for containers.

Here’s what I did:

We had unloaded the freezer contents into our extra freezer and when we did that, I took note of what we had. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll admit that our freezer was an absolute mess. I couldn’t find anything in it. So this was a welcome exercise.) As I unloaded that freezer to take stuff up to the new one today, I sorted the contents. These were our categories. (Obviously, yours might be very different.)

• Meat
• Fish
• Breads
• Coffee
• Nuts and nut flours
• Spices
• Yeast
• Butter

Our freezer came with an automatic ice maker (in the freezer drawer, not the door), but we elected not to use it. One reason is that we don’t have a water line behind the refrigerator. But more importantly, Barry likes very fresh ice and therefore dislikes ice makers. So he’s our ice maker. Works for me.

The freezer drawer has an upper drawer that slides out on top of the lower area. There’s also a movable divider that divides the bottom drawer. So I had zones to work with. I took a look at the categories I had, put them in containers and placed the containers in the freezer. To my delight, the containers I had on hand fit perfectly.

Here’s a picture of the organized bottom drawer:

The meats are on the right-hand side of the drawer. I re-used an Itso bin that we’d had in the old freezer. (Alas, those bins are no longer sold, but you can see what I’m talking about in this blog post). Around the bin, I placed other meats. We have a Food Saver vacuum sealer, so they’re typically nicely sealed up.

On the left side of the divider, I put the nuts and nut flours in a Tall Shoe Box from the Container Store. In front of that, I placed a medium-sized Multipurpose Bin from the Container Store and put the fish in it. And in front of that, a small Multipurpose Bin fit beautifully. (Here’s a link to the Multipurpose Bin. It really is a versatile container.) The bins fit so nicely, on virtually the first try (I was lucky!), that it made my heart sing. In the small Multipurpose Bin, I placed the coffee and yeast (neither of which are used often—it’s back up decaf for when we have people over). I put the spice bottles in a Linus 3- x 12- x 2-inch shallow drawer organizer and rested them on top of the coffee and yeast. The way the container nestled in there was so satisfying!

Here’s a photo of the top retractable drawer:

In the top drawer, we have the ice situation. We chose to remove the ice bin that came with the freezer because it took up the whole left side of the drawer and we didn’t need such a big bin. I replaced it with a small white plastic storage bin with handles (it’s a new favorite of mine) to store the decanted ice. Barry uses two silicon ice cube trays that make actual cubes. He’ll stack those next to the decanted ice when he’s making ice. (I put them in a Linus 6- x 9- x 2-inch shallow drawer organizer to catch any spills.) There is room behind the two ice containers for frozen goods. I put the bread (and butter) on the right side and put a box of ice cream sandwiches behind the decanted ice on the left side.

I was extremely pleased that we were able to fit everything in and so that it’s easy to find what’s in there. I’m hopeful the containers will allow us to maintain the order—I do not want to go back to the hot mess (okay, cold mess) that was our previous freezer!

Tagged with: challenges, freezer organization, kitchen, kitchen organization, organizing products

Comments