Keep Your Kitchen Pantry Organized With A Genius Erasable Marker Hack
Organizing your pantry can be a hassle. Ingredients get shoved to the back of shelves when new stock comes in, chips go stale after being forgotten, and efforts towards maintaining order end up spiraling into a mess after a few days. Label makers and marked bins provide a great solution to this problem, but they don't offer much flexibility if you need to change things up. Thankfully, clever TikTok user @momsurvival came up with a smart and deceptively simple solution to this problem — marking plain bins with erasable markers.
This hack makes things easier to find and gives everything its own specific spot, but it also gives you the opportunity to switch out labels quickly if you need to create space for more groceries, unlike bins with more permanent labels. This way, your pantry can stay clean, tidy, and accessible while still maintaining flexibility, helping to eliminate the problem of forgotten food and reduce the seemingly never-ending questions about where the snacks are.
How to use dry erase makers to label
In TikTok user @momsurvival's video, they write across the front of simple plastic bins with a vivid dry-erase marker and demonstrate how easily they can be wiped clean and repurposed. If you intend to do this hack yourself, the process is pretty similar — pick up some plastic bins that fit on your shelves but are large enough to hold whatever you're planning to store. For additional ease of access, try to find something with handles that can be pulled or carried. Grab a dry-erase marker and label, then wipe away when it's time to switch it up.
When choosing your bins, you could also go with something made of clear acrylic to make what's inside more visible. Unfortunately, however, this means dry-erase markers likely won't show up as well. To combat this, try using bolder, matte chalk markers or taping a piece of white paper to the inside of the bin to create backing and make the text more readable.
What to keep in mind when doing this hack
There aren't many issues associated with this hack as it can be customized to fit your specific needs, but choosing the correct kind of material for your bins is important. To avoid issues when wiping away our labels, choose a plastic option that's smooth and non-porous. Even a small amount of texture can make the ink harder to wipe away. It's also a good idea to avoid bins in darker colors to make the label more visible, but this can be bypassed if you choose chalk markers, as they're better at showing up on dark surfaces.
Additionally, you could run into some issues with staining, especially if you leave the writing on the bin longer than you would on a normal dry-erase board. There are several ways to clear dry-erase maker stains, but one of the easiest is to wipe the area down with a magic eraser. With a bit of scrubbing, you should be left with a surface that's as good as new.