14 Dollar Tree Finds That Will Tidy Up Your Messy Kitchen

PJ McDonnell/Shutterstock

Dollar Tree is a haven for people looking for affordable and functional items for organizing and reducing clutter in their home, especially the kitchen. Even though there are now fewer items priced at $1, and the average prices have gone up to $1.25 and $1.50, it is still one of the few places that offers a lot of great finds at such low prices.

What's great about Dollar Tree is that you can usually find something that you can use or consume daily. Many branches have become a one-stop shop for daily household necessities, including skincare, makeup, seasonal decorations, food, and beverages. The store is also popular among DIY-ers and homestead vloggers who love sharing creative uses of Dollar Tree staples. The store chain may have its fair share of controversies, but for the most part, it is one of the most enjoyable places to shop at when you're looking for kitchen clutter solutions.

Jayz3t/Shutterstock

Often, the things that clutter a kitchen have nothing to do with cooking or food preparation. Cleaning materials are prime examples. Mops, brooms, dust pans, and vacuum cleaners take up more space than most people realize. They can fall over if you simply lean them against the wall, or cause a domino effect of falling miscellanea when stored in a utility closet.

The best way to store long-handled cleaning materials is to keep them upright and off the floor using a wall organizer. Dollar Tree's cleaning tool organizer has five spots for your brooms and comes with screws and anchors, which means you can attach it to almost any surface without the fear of it coming down. If you install one inside a closet, all cleaning tools will be plastered against one wall, giving you more space for other bulky items.

There are so many possible uses for the plastic book bins at Dollar Tree. They are incredible space-savers because they are narrow and fit perfectly inside deep shelves. Many use these book bins under the sink to organize cleaning products like dishwashing pods, sponges, and kitchen towels. They are also excellent for organizing pantry items like sauces, condiment bottles, snacks, and even reusable water bottles.

You can also use book bins for vegetables. Line them with paper bags, and they're good for keeping Chinese lettuce, celery stalks, spinach, and other veggies organized inside the fridge. Likewise, you can use them as containers for sweet potatoes, garlic, onions, and other fruits and vegetables that can be stored at room temperature. 

The key to using book bins for kitchen organization is to categorize their contents. Keep similar items in one bin so you only have to move the container that has what you need. This makes everything on your kitchen shelves and cabinets more accessible and organized.

Dollar Tree

For larger kitchens with more storage space, rectangular bins and baskets are good alternatives to the smaller book bins. The ones at Dollar Tree are pretty good quality, given their $1.25 price tags, not to mention the perfect size for most cupboards and pantry shelves. They are better than wire baskets because nothing will fall through, plus they're rectangular, so they are more space-efficient than their rounder counterparts. It's also easy to wipe off dirt and wash them if necessary.

The large baskets are great for storing aprons, oven mitts, and clean hand towels. Conversely, you can also designate one as a kitchen laundry basket. Pro tip: Dollar Tree sells clear, plastic serving trays that fit perfectly over some of these baskets, which helps utilize your vertical space for more ample storage.

There are also narrow versions that are great for organizing pantry items like condiment sachets, pasta boxes, canned goods, and more. Another benefit is that you can put three or more in a shelf. They are space-efficient, convenient, and can even be used for non-refrigerated veggies and aromatics like garlic, onions, shallots, and ginger.

Dollar Tree

Do you sometimes use different types of oil when cooking or baking? Do you cook a lot of Asian, Italian, or Mediterranean food, and therefore use a lot of vinegar and soy sauce? If your answer's yes, Dollar Tree's clear glass bottles with metal pour spouts should make your cooking area look more presentable.

The spouts of these bottles have snug covers to prevent spills if you accidentally knock them over. Sure, they look basic and less aesthetic compared to fancy oil bottles with cork covers. However, you'll find that fuss-free plastic caps are way better than cork, since it eventually becomes smelly, sticky, and dirty.

You might wonder though, why buy another bottle for oil and liquid condiments if the original bottle packaging is good enough? Because having containers in different shapes, sizes, and colors lined up on the counter adds to the visual clutter in your kitchen. Dollar Tree's bottles are uniformly shaped, so that's half the problem solved already. You can customize them further and stick large labels covering one side of each bottle. This way, even if one or two are nearly empty and you don't want to refill them yet, they can still stay on the counter because everything looks uniform.

Kostikova Natalia/Shutterstock

Dollar Tree's drawer organizers are a must if you're looking for affordable kitchen organization solutions. At only 2 inches high, they should easily fit in most kitchen drawers. They also come with grip bottoms, so you don't have to worry about their contents getting easily jumbled. These organizers are available in different sizes, so you can pick one or a couple of each and assemble them inside your drawers like Tetris.

The long, rectangular organizers (13.5 x 3.75 inches) are great for salad serving spoons and forks, soup ladles, tongs, chopsticks, and table knives. The medium-length versions (9.75 x 3.75 inches) are perfect for spoons, forks, steak knives, and butter knives, and the square organizers (6.75 x 6.75 inches) are ideal for ceramic soup spoons, measuring spoons, and dessert spoons and forks. As for the large organizers (9.75 x 6.75 inches), eight McCormick spice bottles laid horizontally can fit comfortably inside them.

These organizers are better than single-tray organizers with dividers that only go halfway across. You'll just end up dumping all the cutlery in that one drawer, whereas having separate containers encourages you to separate your cutlery and put them in the right spot.

Dollar Tree

If you prefer a higher degree of customization with your drawer organizers, you'll like the Jot expandable organizers. You can make these rectangular containers longer or shorter as needed, which is great when organizing odd-shaped items like a vegetable peeler, potato masher, garlic press, grater, can opener, etc. It's also a smart choice if you're spontaneously buying kitchen drawer organizers at Dollar Tree, but you didn't measure the insides of your drawers beforehand. Expandable organizers, with their adjustable lengths, would be a safer purchase than their non-expandable counterparts.

Adjustable organizers are space-efficient and economical. If your available storage space somehow expands, like if you installed new cabinetry with wider drawers or moved to a new apartment with a bigger kitchen, and thus have more space for storage, you won't have to buy additional organizers anymore. You can simply expand the organizers further so they can fully occupy the larger space.

Let's talk about kitchen cabinet organization. Kitchen cabinets are deep, usually about 24 inches for base cabinets and 12-14 inches for wall and overhead cabinets. This can give you a lot of hard-to-reach, underutilized storage spaces. Fortunately, Dollar Tree has 10-inch acrylic turntables that can help you solve this problem.

Accessibility sometimes has to take priority over space efficiency. Let's be honest: anything you put in the far corners of overhead cabinets will likely stay there for a long time. Even if you remember putting something useful there, like a digital weighing scale, you'll probably end up making excuses not to use it anymore. You'll just look for a measuring cup, then find a website to convert cups to grams because it's such a hassle to pull up a chair, locate the scale, and lift cooking pots or dishes out of the way.

A turntable or lazy Susan can solve this problem. You can use it for storing sauces and condiment bottles, as well as cleaning products under the sink. And if you add a cross-section organizer, you can also use a turntable for the packets of tea, sugar, instant coffee, and creamer in your coffee bar. Bonus tip: If you enjoy baking cakes, you can use a lazy Susan to create Instagram-worthy, ombre cake designs.

Dollar Tree has plenty of clear, acrylic organizers that are excellent for tidying the contents of your refrigerator. Anything you put inside will be visible, so you should see if there are food items you need to eat before they go bad. They are also thick, durable, and some are stackable, so you can make room for more stuff in your fridge. Look for the multi-purpose "Essentials" acrylic drawer organizers. Their dimensions are perfect for fruits, juice boxes, milk boxes, cold brew coffees, chocolate bars, tortilla dips, yogurt bottles, energy drinks, and more. You can place three or more organizers side-by-side. 

There's also a three-compartment acrylic organizer that's originally designed for bathrooms and vanities. The compartments are just the right size for sachets of ketchup, hot sauce, dietary supplement sachets, liquid herbal tonics, and other small items that tend to clutter the shelves on refrigerator doors.

Finally, you don't want to miss Dollar Tree's acrylic soda can organizers. Yes, they're designed for safe storage of canned carbonated drinks, but you can also use them for other things like bananas, apples, green leafy vegetables, and frozen meats.

Egg cartons are made of cardboard material that softens and dents easily when they get damp. You might have to deal with cracked eggs later, so just throw out the egg cartons or recycle them, then grab those egg storage containers from Dollar Tree. The one-dozen containers are thick, sturdy, and have covers that allow you to stack them by twos or threes. 

Dollar Tree also has an alternative to these stackable egg trays: egg shelves. These are designed to clip on a shelf inside your fridge and slide directly underneath it. These egg holders are a space-saver and ideal for tiny fridges because they maximize vertical space. You can switch over to these egg tray shelves if you need more shelf space in your fridge, like for a casserole or a large cake box.

Space_Cat/Shutterstock

Washable and reusable snack bags are a must for organizing your kitchen and pantry. They also help keep food stay fresh longer, which is a plus. 

One great example of this is pouring the contents of opened boxes of cereal into resealable snack bags. They're a cheaper and more space-efficient alternative to the tall, glass containers for pasta. If you don't like those tall, clear pasta bins that organization gurus often recommend for cereals, reusable snack bags are great alternatives.

The smaller, sandwich-sized bags are perfect for leftovers that are too little to put in airtight food containers. Think of half a packet of M&Ms, leftover salsa that's too delicious to throw away, or a few pieces of chicken nuggets your toddler or younger siblings would remember bringing home from McDonald's.

You can also use resealable snack bags when you're doing food prep. If you have limited space in the fridge, resealable snack bags are perfect for storing freshly washed and chopped ingredients. Similarly, these bags are great for freezing small cuts of meat that you've portioned according to the dishes you plan to cook throughout the week. Finally, if you're the type to cook a lot on the weekends and portion the food into smaller servings to reheat later the following week, resealable snack bags will be very handy.

Carlofranco/Getty Images

If given the choice between plastic and glass food containers, go for glass. They are durable, longer lasting, and more resistant to food stains. Glass containers tend to have sturdier and more airtight covers as well, which is an added advantage for preserving freshness. It also doesn't hurt that they look more presentable than plastic containers.

Glass containers can have multiple uses, which is useful for reducing clutter in the kitchen. If you store leftover curry in a glass container, for example, you can take it out of the fridge, let it thaw for a bit, and then chuck it in the microwave. When it's done heating, you can eat directly out of the glass container. This leaves you with one glass container, one lid, and cutlery to wash. Compare that to transferring frozen food to a microwaveable bowl, and again to a dinner plate, which gives you more items to wash, dry, and put back in the cupboard.

By this logic, you can also keep the number of bowls and plates in your kitchen to a minimum if you store food in glass containers with lids. Storage-wise, glass containers are space efficient because they are stackable. So whether they're filled with food in the fridge, or in the cupboard waiting to be used, these Dollar Tree finds are useful for visual decluttering and actual decluttering.

Iuliia Pilipeichenko/Getty Images

Just because we think glass containers are better doesn't mean we've completely sworn off using plastic food containers. Rubbermaid and SureFresh food containers are great for leftovers and setting aside extra servings of food in the fridge.

If you have half-empty bags or boxes of chips, nuts, cereals, dried fruits, or creamer packets cluttering the shelves of your pantry, you can transfer their contents into plastic food containers and throw out all of the bulky, messy packaging. It should be easier to tidy up the space and make sure that everything is visible and accessible.

Plastic food containers with lids do offer some advantages over glass containers. First, they take up less space in a cupboard if you stack all the bottoms together and then put all the lids on top. Second, you can also use them for non-food items like bag clips and dishwasher detergent tablets. And third, you can be a bit rough with these containers because they're not breakable. Even if the plastic cracks or breaks, they are easier and often cheaper to replace than airtight glass containers.

There are many conventional and creative uses for adhesive hooks in a kitchen. For starters, you can stick them at the back of the kitchen door or on the side of the fridge or built-in cabinetry and use them for hanging your aprons, dish towels, and pot holders. You can also stick them high up the backsplash behind the stove or sink so you can hang your spatulas, cooking tongs, can opener, potato peeler, and other cooking tools you use daily.

Now for the more creative uses of adhesive hooks. You can attach two or three of them on the inside of cabinet doors and position them at just the right distances and angles to hold pot covers in place. Similarly, you can stick three or four in a horizontal line, then hook a narrow, wire basket where you can put sponges and kitchen towels — all out of sight, but easily accessible whenever you need them.

If you have open shelving under your sink or kitchen island, and you want to hang a pretty curtain to hide the clutter, you can also use adhesive hooks to support the curtain bar. Just remember to use adhesive hooks purposefully and only for items you use often and daily. You wouldn't want to display clutter, after all.

Maya Kruchankova/Shutterstock

One popular interior design principle says that if you must have multiple items out on display, group them in a tray so that they appear as one unit. Their placements will appear intentional, and they'll look less cluttered as a result.

We can apply the same rule to kitchen counters. Suppose you like to light a scented candle while baking. You also like to have a flower vase, tissue holder, cookie jar, and a small decorative plate where your keys usually go. Instead of putting them in the corners or on intervals along your kitchen counter, put all of them inside a Dollar Tree woven straw basket. This clears your counter while keeping everything visible and within reach.

What if the only things on your counter are small items like a Pomodoro timer and a toothpick holder? You can use one of those small, wooden trays in the crafting aisle instead. Got a flair for styling and have some woodworking materials in the garage? You can buy one or two bamboo cutting boards at Dollar Tree, jazz them up with some wood stain and Rubio Monocoat sealer, and place your kitchen trinkets on top of them instead of a tray.

Take these Dollar Tree organization ideas as inspiration for tidying your kitchen. The best part about all this is that once you become familiar with Dollar Tree products, you'll have more creative ideas on how to improve your kitchen's organization.