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Before I owned shelf risers, my life looked something like this: All my canned goods, spices, and jars of nut butter had homes on lazy Susans, so they were accessible without requiring that I completely rearrange the cabinets every time I wanted peanut butter. But I didn’t have storage solutions for grains, nuts, or other bulk items: I had to dig through piles of pasta boxes or bags of rice to get the thing I wanted. Yes, there was rice spillage. Yes, I dumped an entire pound of spaghetti on the counter more than once.
Since I’ve collected a truly wild quantity of pantry items for a solo dweller, dishware is confined to a single cabinet with two shelves. B.S.R. (Before Shelf Risers), pasta bowls, cereal bowls, serving bowls, and tiny bowls were all stacked together in one single teetering pile. Same went for my plates: Big serving platters sat at the base with standard-size plates stacked on top of them and dessert/snack plates on top of those. Ornate plates I used only for entertaining were stacked right along with everyday white plates. Every time I wanted a pasta bowl, I’d have to move five cereal bowls and a series of ramekins off the top of it, then restack everything. Putting away dishes meant building and rebuilding a Jenga stack of plates two or three times a day.
Meanwhile, within each cabinet, there was empty space above my teetering dishware—space that was infuriatingly available, but not usable.
You know where this is going. Shelf risers are simply a flat (often metal) surface with four legs: essentially, a freestanding ledge that divides the space in your cabinets and creates a second shelf for storage. For about $50 total, they revolutionized my cabinet storage situation. Pasta bowls and little ramekins now perch on the riser, and the cereal bowls and everyday plates rest below. Because my cabinets are oddly deep, I now store the less-often needed entertaining plates on another shelf riser behind my everyday dishes. Now, I don’t have to unstack and restack to get the exact dish I want—and the high priority dishes are front and center.
The dish reorganization was so successful that I bought risers for my glasses too. Little bodega glasses go on top, while my larger water glasses rest on the bottom shelf. Next, I added risers to my pantry so the boxes of pasta can go on top, while the rice and other grains live below (I’ve also started decanting my grains into food storage bins so they’re less likely to spill and can be stacked underneath the risers in a modular fashion). No more digging for hidden grains. No more cascade of pasta onto my head (or floor, or counter). Risers make everything in my kitchen more accessible, and they make my cabinets feel fit for organization TikTok.
Having direct access to the tools and ingredients that we use every day in our kitchens is a small change that makes a shockingly big difference. It seems over the top to declare that a $10 purchase (per riser) could make you feel like a different person—a wholly more organized person—but that’s what shelf risers have done for me. With each thing in its proper place, my cabinets feel like a tiny, contained, orderly planet in a chaotic universe.
Shelf Risers I Love
For my own risers, I went with the utilitarian white metal look. For a restaurant-y look, you can go pure stainless steel. Wood or clear acrylic would look particularly great if you have open shelving.
