The Great Refrigerator Cleanout- Before & After

Ivy says:

I cleaned out my fridge yesterday, right on schedule. Some commenters asked for before and after pictures, and I’m glad to oblige! I’ll give you some tips on how I clean out my refrigerator as well.

The first thing I do is fill a bucket with lukewarm water and either a cleaning product or vinegar. Right now I’m fairly flush with cleaning products (I’m a cleaning products addict. It’s sad.) and running low on vinegar, so I used a generic version of “Orange Clean” I picked up somewhere. Grab a washrag and an absorbent towel.

Now, here’s what I had to deal with:

It looks like there’s a whole lot of food in there, but it’s just arranged badly and there are a few science projects going on there that need to be dealt with. As always, work from top to bottom. I have the nice slide out glass shelves, so I rarely need to remove them for cleaning.

What I do takes a bit more electricity, but I think it’s the safer way- I go ahead and work right in the refrigerator. I pulled out the stuff that needed to be thrown away, moved the stuff that was going to stay to another shelf. I wash down the sides and shelves as I go.

I reorganized to make things easier to find by grouping items together. For example, my condiment pockets in the door were like this:

The salsa and the tequila and the Catalina dressing all in one place? Oh noes! We can’t have that! So I reorganized so it all looked like this:

Salad dressing type stuff in one pocket, alcohol in all the rest of the pockets. I know how this must look, I promise we’re not alcoholics. We actually drink so rarely that whenever we have people in, we end up with hordes of extra alcohol and we don’t want to waste it! Sometimes we cook with it, but even that’s rare.

Anyway, once the refrigerator is cleaned out and reorganized, it looks like this:

Now, I know you’re wondering where all my veggies are- let’s just say I’m waiting for the Farmer’s Market to come around on Friday. Well, that and we eat a lot of frozen veggies, because they’re a lot cheaper. If you want to see all my pictures of the great refrigerator cleanout plus a picture of a tiger in mourning, go here.