Extraordinary Uses for Hanging Produce Baskets

Our basement is circa 1970. The ceilings are on the low side and filled with water pipes and gas pipes and some mysterious phone pipes that are no longer used. Our electric box is right behind the washer and dryer which is annoying because I would have liked to put shelves there for dryer sheets, stain remover and detergents and the like. So, I found a perfect use for this hanging produce basket which was once very useful as a produce basket at our last house which was skimpy on the kitchen cupboards. In the basement of this house I hung it over the pipes in the ceiling and it hangs at perfect arms reach for grabbing stain removers, dryer sheets and other laundry necessities above the dryer. I am sure these hanging baskets could come in handy in many places. I love finding unintended useful purposes for cheap things or in this case for something I already had.

Extraordinary Uses for Binders

Binders can organize so many things. If you have some shelf real estate to plop them on they are so accessible and have so much potential. Of course there are obvious uses for binders. I use several for recipes. I have one binder labeled “Culinary Experiments” (recipes I have not yet tried but intend to), another “Culinary Collections” (the tried and true recipes), and one for “Desserts and Breads.” I don’t get bogged down with details like cutting and pasting recipes. I just slide cardstock in clear protector sheets and put the cut out recipes on top so they are easier to read. I don’t paste or anything, that way if my Culinary Experiment recipe is a success I can easily slide it out and move it to the Culinary Collections binder.

I used to enjoy browsing through home magazines (who has time for that now with three kids?) and I would always tear out a picture of something that I really liked. I have a “Home Ideas” binder that includes several categories of my magazine tear outs. The tabs include “Architecture,” “Gardening,” “Decorating Projects,” and “Gift Ideas.” The binder came in very handy when we moved into our untouched 1970s house that was in terrible need of a new kitchen. I had collected pictures of kitchens that I liked for years and even though I didn’t know exactly why I liked the pictures, it gave the cabinet makers a place to start when trying to figure out what we wanted.

The best housewarming gift ever given to us was a binder labeled Menus. Several years ago we moved from the east coast to the Midwest when I was 8 months pregnant. A friend of ours drove around our new town before we arrived and gathered take out menus. Not only did she put the menus in clear protector sheets in a binder that was cleverly decorated in old photos but she even categorized the menus by food type: Italian, Chinese, Sandwich Places, etc. This binder is a permanent fixture in our house.

My most recent binder creation of a couple years ago is labeled “Greeting Cards.” In the front I have a sheet that lists everyone’s birthdays by month and I included greeting card holidays like mother’s day and father’s day by month. Behind that sheet I have 17 clear protector pocket sheets. Each clear pocket is labeled with my handy dandy label maker at the top right hand corner. The first twelve are labeled the months of the year, then there are clear pockets for blank cards, generic birthday cards (those that aren’t for anyone specific), get well cars, sympathy cards and thank you cards. So, you know how sometimes you will be looking for a birthday card for Amy and as you are reading them you come across the perfect card for Jim? Well now I can get the perfect card that I found for Jim even though his birthday isn’t for another 10 months because I have somewhere to put it that I know I will find it again. I’ll put it in my October pocket. For some reason card shopping is one of the most challenging things to shop for with my kids. They have no patience for me to pick out the perfect card and if they aren’t restrained in a shopping cart they love to run down the card isle and pull them out and destroy any card organization the store has in place.

I use binders when we go home to the east coast to visit family. I print out the phone numbers to our friends and family out east as well as favorite restaurants that we want to visit and phone numbers of our neighbors in case we would need to check up on something back home. I include maps, activities for kids and the hours of the various establishments we hope to visit and I keep our receipts in one of the clear protector sheets with a tally sheet so we can stay within our vacation budget.

I know there are many more ways to use a simple binder with clear protector sheets to organize various things. I have several empty binders waiting to be filled.

Invention Box – Perhaps A Lesson in Minimalist Frugality?

I would think that most of us would like to teach our kids to think creatively so that they can overcome obstacles in life and make the most out of things and I would also guess that we all want them to be able to do this with little or no resources. Planting some seeds for this skill is my goal with our “Invention Box.” I don’t recall where I originally came across the idea, maybe my mother-in-law or maybe the Tightwad Gazette, but it has been a hit with my 6 year old for quite some time and I am working on developing this skill with my 4 year old. My kids love making stuff. They don’t need a whole lot. A box, some construction paper, scissors and tape are favorite “making stuff” materials. I keep trash for our invention box. Plastics, cardboard, yogurt containers, cottage cheese containers, you name it. If my son sees me putting something in the recycle bin that has an interesting shape he say, “no mom, put it in the invention box!” So we have a huge pile of trash, I mean Invention Box materials for making “stuff.” We even get neighbors and grandparents to saving stuff for our invention box. Once we solicited everyone we knew for frozen juice lids to make a knights armor. We had neighbors that drank orange juice from frozen concentrate every day. We had it together in no time.


Here is a picture of my son’s latest space ship creation with “stuff.” On this one he even got his school Principal to agree to let him take home an empty milk carton. I'm not sure it is supposed to be on the front but I do know that the paper towel rolls are the "blasters" in the back. The black things are pipe cleaners. He can stick his head through the bottom hole that he had me cut and fly it around while he looks out the clear container that our Sam's Club spinach came in.





Here he is flying his straw jet plane.






For Halloween we made this spooky graveyard out of a box, tissue paper, construction paper, Q-tips and some Halloween stickers someone gave us. This is the only project that I helped invent. Usually he does it all one his own.
He also made a cool monster using a clear V8 container, filling it with green tissue paper and taping green construction paper arms. I did not get a picture of it before my 1 year old tore the arms off though. My daughter made a haunted house out of a box but she lost interest before finishing it. Why we buy toys I will never understand.

Extraordinary Uses for Bread Tabs!

While I am putting off completing my December menu I thought I would tell you about the extraordinary uses of bread tabs. Yep, those little plastic things that you find on the end of your store bought loaf of bread. They are actually quite useful and I don’t mean for bag cinching. Just yesterday I used a bread tab to help scrub my sink and to scrape three cookie sheets clean of chocolate chip cookie crusts. They are great at getting hard to get globs of who-knows-what that is stuck to nearly anything without scratching the surface and drastically cutting down on scrub time. Bread tabs are much like those plastic scrapers that you receive from Pampered Chef with their stoneware. I only have one of those Pampered Chef scrapers but I keep several bread tabs in my sponge pullout sink drawer thingy (whatever it’s called). The bread tabs aren’t sturdy enough to last years but you come by so many of them that they are easily replaceable. You can also use them to scrape out bar soap gook from your soap dish in the bathroom.