Organize your refrigerator and freezer

Welcome to Day 5 of the Whip  Your Kitchen Into Shape challenge! If you missed the introduction to the challenge, go here to find out all about it.

Today's task shouldn't be too difficult if you tossed your expired food yesterday.

Today we're going to organize the refrigerator and freezer. Hopefully, you have a little less to deal with after getting rid of all your expired food yesterday. Also, now is the time to wipe down your refrigerator shelves and doors. If you have the time to do a serious, thorough cleaning of you refrigerator interior, then definitely go for it! However, if you are short on time, just take 5 minutes and wipe down the most obvious spots that need it. Just doing that can make a huge difference. That's definitely all I had time to do.

Here's what my refrigerator and freezer look like after organizing:

You can see the before pictures in yesterday's post, but I really didn't do much expect straighten up a little. I purposely do not invest a whole lot of time or money in organizing my fridge, because the contents are always changing. Also, I consider myself a complete freezer organizing failure (although it's not too bad at the moment mostly because I don't have too much in there), and that's okay. Some time ago I  organized my freezer, and it looked great. Here's the before and after:

I even made pretty labels for everything:

However, just a few months later I wrote this post about how my beautiful organized freezer turned out to be a major organizing fail. Basically, it was a pain to retrieve things and didn't account for how quickly the contents would change, so I compromised by maintaining the freezer inventory sheet instead. At least I always know what is in there, even if it doesn't look beautifully organized.

Go ahead and organize your refrigerator/freezer, and at least take 5 minutes to wipe down any obvious crumbs or messes in the refrigerator. 

Then stop by our challenge Facebook group to show us how it looks or share the before and after photos of your refrigerator on Instagram with the hashtag #KitchenChallenge. I can't wait to see your progress! (Also, let me know if you have the elusive freezer organizing system that actually works!)