How one fridge change revolutionised my weekly grocery shop

9honey Living’s The Wash Up: Your 30-day spring cleaning guide is a month-long series aimed at making your annual house clean easier with hacks and expert advice.
Cleaning out the fridge is one of those “bane of my existence” tasks I often only remember to do once or twice a year.
This year, I am embarrassed to admit the bi-annual fridge clean had not happened by the time spring cleaning rolled around.
Thus, I have been left with a hodge-podge messy fridge with all sorts of sticky residue and old jars that no longer resemble the food they once were.
READ MORE: How to deep clean your kitchen sink so it sparkles and smells fresh
One issue I have with keeping my fridge clean is the fact I get a weekly drop of Marley Spoon meals for four nights of the week.
This means I need to find room to stuff the four bulky paper bags, as well as the meat and other cold items, in the limited shelf space I have left.
Throughout the week, I also buy a few extra items and ready-made meals for lunch which makes the fridge even more stocked.
So I decided to wait until spring cleaning season to really sort out this ongoing fridge problem. And the solution? Well, it’s so simple I wish it hadn’t taken me years to figure it out.
All I needed to do was clear out a shelf of old bits and bobs to make the appliance a little tidier and easy to manage.
No longer do I have to shove the bags into the vegetable crisper and hope for the best.
The Marley Spoon bags now sit there, right at eye-level, as a reminder that we have dinner at home. Literally.
I don’t want to over-exaggerate here – but this small tweak to my fridge has revolutionised the space and made my weekly Marley Spoon arrival far easier.
READ MORE: How to clean and declutter your pantry so it actually stays organised
Of course, the contents of my fridge also needed a bit of a spring clean anyway.
When I dug into the deep recesses of the refrigerator, I found a jar of vegemite that was a year out of date, a slice of pizza from two weekends ago and some slices of lemon I was hoping to save for my next fish recipe. But, alas, I never used them.
I felt a little like Ross Geller from Friends when he reorganised Joey’s fridge and sorted the food into shelves of meats and dairy, fruits and vegetables (both of which were empty) and a packed shelf full of expired products.
It’s so easy to forget what you chuck into the fridge after a big dinner or some takeaway.
As well as the mass dumping of old food, I cleaned out the shelves and vegetable crispers of old food, crumbs and spills.
READ MORE: Pro’s hack keeps the bathroom clean in 60 seconds
I used a combination of Ajax spray and wipe to get rid of the grime and a spot of Windex to keep the shelves looking shiny and clear.
At some points, paper towels didn’t cut it and I needed to break out the stainless steel scrub. It’s quite an old fridge, but with a bit of grunt work it was mostly good as new.
For a daily dose of 9honey, subscribe to our newsletter here.
The last shelf is full of bottles of wine yet to be opened or champagne I need to stop saving for a special occasion.
And I have now delegated my second shelf to left-over meals, ready-to-eat lunches and half-eaten products like cans of tomato or ham.
This will also help serve as a reminder to me before I do a grocery shop that I still have salvageable food from my last visit to the supermarket.
READ MORE: A $2.50 pantry staple rid microwave of horrific stench
READ MORE: Cleaning products you didn’t know you needed
I predict this is going to save me a lot of money in the long-run from buying extra lemons, avocados, tomatoes or slices of cheese when I already have plenty in the fridge.
If you do the calculations, one $2.20 avocado, one $1.20 lemon, $2.60 for three tomatoes and $7.70 for cheese at Woolworths, I’m looking at saving around $13.70 on average for my weekly top-up shop.
If I managed to avoid re-buying these items every second week, I could manage to scrape back around $338 a year.
FOLLOW US ON WHATSAPP HERE: Stay across all the latest in celebrity, lifestyle and opinion via our WhatsApp channel. No comments, no algorithm and nobody can see your private details.