Soak Your Fridge Shelves In The Bathtub For The Ultimate Clean

It happens to all of us; You put away the groceries after a long day and you didn't get around to properly storing your meat. You just put it on the bottom shelf and left it for the next day. Then the next morning you open your refrigerator to find out your ground beef leaked all over the bottom shelf and has dripped into the vegetable drawer. Now you're looking at a serious mess to clean up. Instead of awkwardly cleaning your shelves in the kitchen sink, here's a better way: soak your fridge shelves in the bathtub.

The bathtub is the perfect size to fit those oversized shelves from your refrigerator to get them truly clean. It provides enough space to spray them down with hot water (especially if you have a detachable sprayer), soak them to get them truly clean, and give them a good rinse without getting water everywhere. After you finish cleaning, it might be the perfect time to implement a smart way to organize your fridge so that food never goes to waste. Using this easy cleaning hack, your shelves will be sparkling clean in less than no time.

The first thing you should do before removing your refrigerator shelves is to have a place to store your food while the shelves are soaking. A cooler with ice should do the job. Secondly, you'll need a place to set your shelves until they reach room temperature (spraying hot water on cold glass can cause it to shatter). Once they've warmed up, you're ready to start soaking. There are many DIY vinegar cleaning solutions to tackle every mess in your home, but for soaking your refrigerator shelves, a good ratio is 2 to 3 teaspoons of dish soap with 2 cups of white vinegar.

Put your shelves into a clean bathtub, cover with warm water, and then add the vinegar/dish soap solution. You'll want to soak them until the food spills begin to loosen up and become easier to scrub off. Once you've scrubbed them clean, drain the bathtub, and give them a rinse with warm water.

After you have finished cleaning your shelves and put them back in your refrigerator, you may want to give the seal around the door a proper clean as well, as cleaning this part of your fridge is more important than you probably realized. There's nothing more satisfying than putting groceries into a nice, clean refrigerator.