Quick and Easy Cheap and Healthy Organize Your Home with Empty Shipping Boxes

Link to Quick and Easy Cheap and Healthy

Organize Your Home with Empty Shipping Boxes

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 09:01 PM PDT

I’m so happy you are here with us this week for 5 Days of Organizing – more than 20 bloggers will be bringing you daily inspiration for organizing every aspect of your life. And with back-to-school days breathing down our necks, we all need it!

Have you ever been frustrated by all the creative organization ideas you see in magazines and on blogs, only to realize that you simply can’t afford (or don’t want to spend the money) all those gorgeous bins, boxes, baskets and other containers? Me, too! I’ve learned to organize my home (uh, to a certain extent) without spending an arm and a leg, and I’ll be sharing my tricks with you all week long. Stick with me for great cheap organizing ideas!

You might want to scroll down to the bottom to enter the $50 Paypal cash giveaway, and then click on the footer image to find a whole bunch more giveaways (including one of Your Grocery Budget Toolbox by yours truly!).

So far this week, I’ve shown you my Yard-Sale Spice Cupboard Makeover, my Free Pantry Organization System, and my Dollar Tree Organized Sets.

Today, I’m going to share with you another favorite organizing trick that is absolutely free. Well, sort of. I guess it all depends on if you won a giveaway or did a little online shopping. In any case, whenever the UPS (or the USPS, or FedEx, I’m not picky) knocks on your door and delivers a package… save the box! No matter its size or shape, it will come in handy for containing and organizing something somewhere in your home.

Now, a little caveat: don’t get too carried away here, folks. If you win too many giveaways or do a little too much online shopping, you might find yourself overrun with more boxes than you can handle. And if you’re having trouble organizing the boxes that you are saving to organize with… well, then, you’ve got trouble, my friend. With a capital T.

My rule of thumb is this: if I have an out-of-the-way space to save the box indefinitely, I will. Sometimes I have smaller boxes hanging around the corners of my laundry room for quite some time. But if I don’t really have the space to keep the box, I just hold on to it for a few days until either I’m sick and tired of moving it around to get it out of my way or I have found a practical use for it elsewhere in the house. Then I use it or lose it.

And how do I use these boxes? Well, pictured above you see one example. I used to have all those boxes of wraps (you know: foil, plastic wrap, wax paper, zip-top bags, etc.) piled in a heap on the floor of my pantry. I never knew how many of each I had and what I was out of, and frankly, it was a huge mess.

When I recently re-organized my pantry, tackling that disorderly heap was one of my first jobs! It was quite easy, really. The long boxes holding the wraps fit perfectly inside a rectangular box that had recently arrived. I set the box on its side on one of the pantry shelves, and now I can see easily how much foil or wax paper I have. What’s more, I can easily access each box without having to dig through a pile. Brilliant, really! And since I don’t care what it looks like, being in the pantry and not visible to the average visitor, I just left the box plain. But the beauty of a cardboard box is that you can quickly, easily, and frugally decorate it with some wrapping paper or scrap paper.

That’s not the only place I’ve used a cardboard box, though. Hardly!

Organize with Shipping Boxes

for off-season clothing storage (I have read that cardboard is actually a better storage solution for clothing than plastic because it allows the fabric to “breathe” – just be sure it’s not anywhere accessible to critters that can chew through the cardboard. Ew.)
for Christmas decoration storage
under the sink to contain all the junk that collects there.
under the bathroom sink to contain that 36-pack of toilet paper
as a depository for no-longer-wanted items – once it’s filled, it’s all ready to go to the Goodwill!
as a toy rotater - if your child has too many toys, box some of them up and hide them somewhere; in a month or two, bring out the hidden toys and hide some more.
book storage – if you simply don’t have any hidden place to put the boxes, cover them up with a table cloth and call it a nightstand/side table.
clothes your children have outgrown (if you’re saving them for baby)

That’s just scratching the surface of what these boxes can do! And since they come in all shapes and sizes, they can fit all kinds of different needs. Happy boxing!

Do you save shipping boxes?

Visit these blogs for lots more ideas on organizing your kitchen, your office, or your homeschool room!