WFMW: Organizing plastic dishes

We use a ton of different plastic dishes in our house. Storage, eating, mixing, you name it. We use a lot of sizes and shapes. Even though I did a LOT of culling when we moved a few months ago, I've still got a fair amount. The worst part is the storage. Ones that are exactly alike will nest together, but when you've got about 20 different sizes and shapes, the amount of nesting is minimal.

Which makes the overall storage problem a nightmare if you try to just stick them in a cabinet. They fall over, roll around, and the less-used items pile up at the back, never to see the light of day.

I came up with this idea a few years ago in our old house. I use two boxes, glued together, but you could just as easily use one box as long as it's long enough to take up most of the space in the cabinet. The trick is to get boxes that are as big as possible, but that will still slide in and out of the cabinet. Just put a handle of some kind on the end, and you can just pull the whole thing out as needed. You could, of course, make something much prettier than mine - I don't worry about it too much because it's behind the door, so who will ever see it?

Tucked in the boxes, the dishes don't fall all over the place, they don't roll out of the cabinet when you pull out one dish, and nothing gets lost in the back - you can pull the whole thing out and look at every dish so you know you're not missing anything.

If you don't have many plastic dishes, you could store the dishes in one box and the lids in another box. I have my lids in another part of the kitchen because I have so many.

Be sure to check Shannon's blog for more WFMW posts!