How to Organize Your Plastic Bags

This is seriously such a short, quick tip that I almost feel silly posting it. But it has been such an easy and helpful fix for our kitchen, that I just wanted to share it.

You probably have a million plastic bags in your home from the grocery store. I love to reuse these for everything - but mostly as little garbage bags for the trash cans all around our house. But storing them can be a huge pain.

Enter the empty tissue box...

Just stuff your plastic bags into the empty tissue box - and voila - easy and instant storage.

There are fancier ways to store your plastic bags, but none as cheap, stackable, and easy to access as this method (or so says I :) ).

It's perfect for your kid-helpers as well. When it's trash night in our house, I just give a box to each boy and let them gather and replace the plastic bags in the various trash cans around the house.

So how do you store your plastic bags? I'd love to hear your tips as well...

Sharing at these great parties...

DIY Menu Board & Weekly Calendar

Another fun Silhouette project - I created this menu board and weekly calendar for our kitchen.

I had seen dry erase calendars at the store but I didn't like that they started the week on Sunday. For us, the weeks starts on Monday - so I created my own.

It was an easy project - just a frame with glass, then I designed and cut my shapes from vinyl with my Silhouette.

 A quick and easy project to update our kitchen - thanks for looking!


      

Knife Block - Round 2

Decided to get just a little bit fancier with the knife block by adding a vinyl word to the tiny space at the bottom. Again, inspired by Tiffany's version with the chalkboard vinyl.

I did mine in white vinyl, cut on my Silhouette. I used Google Translate to translate the word "knives" to French and came up with "couteaux" (again, thanks for Tiffany for the idea!). I used the font Plantagenet Cherokee (this one came with Windows) and added the brackets to each side. Easy and cute.

Updated Knife Block

I saw Tiffany's post yesterday on DIY Club and got a wild hair to do the same thing to my yucky, old knife block. It's only been staring at me for the last 7 years (at least). It's not pretty in the least - and I was planning to just buy a new one.

(Sorry for the poor "before" photo - I didn't take a pic of the knife block before transforming it - I was too excited! So this is the best I could do. It's that wooden thing to the right of the stove.)

But inspiration stuck after seeing how pretty it could be with a little spray paint. Voila!

So much better... very much matches my new kitchen. I used Valspar's black spray paint in satin finish. It's honestly a little too glossy for me, but I still like it better than the old wooden knife block.

Before painting it, I sanded it down on all sides with some sandpaper I found in hubby's toolbox. It was very grungy - who knew it would be so dirty just sitting on the counter all these years? Yuck. After sanding, it looked so much better already, but I was set on painting it by then.

This was the first time I'd tried to use spray paint. It was a bit harder than I thought it would be. I did get a couple of spots where the paint sorta dripped, but not enough for anyone but me to notice.

All-in-all, I love it completely. Thanks Tiffany for the inspiration!