5 Smart Ways To Repurpose Large Egg Trays For An Organized Kitchen

Egg carton crafts can be high-labor, low-value affairs that involve lots of cutting and painting and gluing. A vase of egg carton flowers might take you as long to make as seeding and watering 10 acres of an actual garden. While taking one from trash to a work of art is rewarding, to get a real return on your investment, you want to reuse them in a way that takes advantage of their shape (less cutting!) and maybe even helps you in some way. And where do you need more help than in getting your kitchen better organized? That is, aside from using an egg carton to get your office in order.

We found a lot of cool kitchen upcycling opportunities for egg cartons — everything from improvised ice trays to extra space for, you guessed it, eggs. And with carton-based papier mâché, you can make just about anything. But the ones we picked are all pretty simple and actually solve real kitchen problems.

A thing that's designed for holding things turns out to be eggceptionally good at — wait for it — holding things! You might have seen people use egg trays to organize their nuts and bolts, jewelry, and breadboard-friendly computer sensors. The usual process is to cut off the lid of a carton, toss it, and start sorting and stowing your valuables. But hang on a minute: You're wasting a perfectly good organizational opportunity here, and you've already done the work to make it. After all, egg cartons aren't just for decluttering junk drawers anymore.

Retrieve those carton lids from the recycling bin, line them up side by side on your kitchen counter, and bam — instant and free drawer dividers. Open the nearest compartment and start putting things in the lids. They're great for keeping your whisks from getting tangled up with your corkscrews, and we all know how painful that can be. And if you don't have any jewelry to stow, skip the cutting altogether and slip the opened carton into a drawer, making instant storage for larger items like your collection of offset spatulas as well as a place to keep your collection of corn holders from getting mixed up.

Organizing, in just about every sense, is about dividing things and keeping them apart. The problem is that as we separate them, we often also make them less easy to access, meaning that organizing things can actually cost you time. Egg trays to the rescue! The unique shape of cartons makes them eggstraordinarily suitable for separating things while holding them up. Think about all those trivets piled in a corner of your cabinet. When you can't be bothered to dig around for the fleur de lis trivet and instead settle on the Celtic knot design, you're robbing yourself of joy and insulting an entire culture to boot.

But stand them up in an egg tray and you can pull out the one you need without even disturbing the others. The really cool thing is that you can store many different kinds of things the same way. From saucers to pot lids to those folding steamer baskets that look like they can't possibly work but do, this hack has you covered.

Storing things upright has benefits beyond simple access, especially if they're fresh out of the sink from a good hand-wash. Trust us, no good comes from using a wet trivet. The trouble is finding a place to let things properly air-dry, which usually requires them to be stood upright with some space between them like the items. Well, as you probably suspected from the context clues, egg trays can do that, too.

For whatever reason, most of the people we've seen using egg cartons to dry things focus on apples. There is probably some plague of wet fruits around and we just haven't caught on yet, but it seems fair enough. After all, paper egg cartons are absorbent enough to practically pull the moisture off your apples. (In spite of this hack, it does not appear that the phrase "pull the moisture off of those galas" existed on the web before now. Is there anything egg cartons can't do?) For long-term or frequent use, you might want to eschew the paper cartons and go with styrofoam or plastic designs that will be less likely to grow mold.

Relevance beyond the omelet is the perpetual struggle of egg carton manufacturers. Unfortunately, that's pretty unlikely. But one YouTuber, clearly and conveniently named Egg Carton Manufacturer (whose handle, @eggcartonmanufacturer9612, implies rather more egg carton manufacturers than we might have suspected), has some ideas. Some better than others.

The one we're interested in here is the pin board. With nearly zero effort, you have a place to store things so that you can forget about them in plain sight: bills, receipts, color swatches, bills, receipts, etc. Attach multiple cartons together for as much space as you want — it's that simple.

Okay, this one is pretty common among the online community of egg crate hoarders, but we've selected the genius trick of YouTuber Clean With Confidence to illustrate a few important points. The basic hack is to use an egg carton or tray to secure condiment bottles in an unnatural but necessary state of upside-downness as they near the end of their lives. For the average ovophobe, there is no relief from the torment of having your upside-down, ⅛-full jar of sriracha un-upended by a haughty bottle of Worcestershire sauce when you close the fridge. You then have to restart the entire process of coaxing the remnants toward the mouth of the jar (another phrase for which Google has no precedent).

Clean With Confidence isn't having it. One must not waste any of the precious ranch selection, they surely reasoned, and while looking for a solution, they found a surfeit of egg cartons. Cutting off the lid and placing the carton in a door compartment provides just the right place for a good bottle to proudly stand improperly with just enough support. You should get in on this hack soon, since it will probably be made obsolete by ever-inventive condiment makers. Note in the picture that the ketchup bottle is both upside-down and rightside-up, an innovation that took all of human (or at least ketchup) history to come up with. Surely it will soon replace skinny-necked ranch bottles everywhere.