6 Ideas For Organizing Your Home With Plastic Containers

Because you can find them in such a wide variety of shapes, sizes, styles, and colors, plastic containers are some of the most useful tools for organizing, storing, and displaying items.

The industry already knows how useful plastic containers are in businesses like retail stores, restaurants, and hotels; however, do homeowners know how useful plastic containers are in their own homes?

Maybe you need a way to organize your child's small toys, or you're looking for art supply containers for your craft room. If you're a homeowner - or even a renter - looking for ideas on how to better organize your home, check out the descriptions listed below for using plastic containers to organize six areas of your home.

1. Kitchen

Plastic containers are excellent organizational tools and display fixtures for kitchens.

Homeowners can use traditional round, square, or hexagon containers of various sizes to hold frequently used items like keys, address books, and matchbooks, as well as handgrip containers to store food items like flour, sugar, and seasonings. These containers are also great for holding those little extras like plastic utensils, packets of salt, pepper, sugar, and condiments, and even hand wipes we often end up with after a trip to or delivery from a restaurant.

2. Home Office

Whether you work at home or need a quiet place dedicated to managing your bills or doing homework, you definitely want your home office to be organized.

Consider using plastic containers to organize, store, and display various home office tools like writing utensils, markers, and highlighters; extra ink cartridges for your computer printer; staples, paperclips, and tacks; and small Post-It notepads.

3. Work Areas

Work areas vary from home to home. You might have a storage shed dedicated to completing your home repair tasks, or you might use your attic, basement, or garage. Wherever your home's work area is, it's important to keep it well organized.

Plastic containers are great tools for organizing and storing small work items like nuts, screws, bolts, and nails. You can even use them to organize rolls of measuring tape, electrical tape, and painter's tape.

4. Craft Areas

Like your home's work area, your home's craft area - whether it you have a special room set aside for crafts or you have dedicated a corner of your living room to your sewing machine - containers lots of small items in need of organizing.

You can use plastic containers to organize and display craft items like spools of thread, small balls of yarn, and sewing and knitting needles; small containers of glitter and sequins; buttons; appliqués; paint and paint brushes; and small bottles of glue and glue sticks for glue guns.

5. Children's Rooms

Children's rooms are havens for small toys like building blocks, rogue game pieces and puzzle pieces, and figurines. You can use plastic containers to help organize these items, making it easy for you and your child to find them and store them after playing.

6. Rec Rooms

Each homeowner uses his or her home's "rec" room for various purposes. This might be the room where your family spends time together, or it might be the room where you manage the bills. Because plastic containers work so well as organizational, storage, and display tools, they'll also work well to organize, store, and display any kind of small item you have in your rec room!


By Terry Keenan

Candy Concepts, Inc. specializes in providing businesses with everything from a wide variety of candy containers to the bulk candy and novelty items to fill them with! Learn more about the kinds of bulk plastic containers you can use for your merchandise displays when you visit Candy Concepts, Inc.'s sister website, All Candy Containers.com.

Organize Your Sewing Or Craft Room

One of the most cost-effective hobbies a person can have is needlework. The hobbyist concentrates on a creative, relaxing pastime that produces an attractive, useful item to wear, to use in the home, or to give as a gift. Also, as lifestyles become more and more hectic, these skills, once practiced by members of most households, have become increasingly rare. With time, patience, and practice, these skills can become marketable in this age of mass-produced, mediocre goods. The needlework hobbyist can easily justify claiming permanent space in the home for her hobby, and for collecting and organizing the best tools to practice that hobby. Here are some ideas for organizing your sewing room or craft room.

Whether your hobby is quilting, garment or home sewing, fabric-oriented crafts, or embroidery on fabric, you will need to divide your workspace into areas for specialized tasks, and will need some basic tools for working with fabric. First, organize your sewing/craft room around the following tasks:

•Wash: Designate a time devoted to washing or otherwise preparing your fabrics or other supplies such as tapes or zippers. Most fabrics need to be pre-shrunk before cutting them. All fabric needs to be clean before it is worked. Nothing is more discouraging than having a small smudge that will not come out on a completed embroidery piece or garment. The entire project can be ruined because care was not taken in the beginning. Set aside part of the laundry room for any special soaps, detergents, or spot cleaners suitable for the types of fabric you need to prepare. If the item is to be hand washed only, keep a small bottle of delicate care laundry soap or detergent (along with a couple of towels for this purpose) near your kitchen sink to take advantage of the larger sink and counter space—unless you have a large sink in the laundry room.

•Dry: Have an area where fabrics can be blocked on a table or stretched on a rack to dry. This area should be safely away from cooking fumes, pets, children’s hands, or anything else that might cause the fabric to be re-soiled. Some fabrics can be dried in the drier, but should be immediately hung or folded to prevent wrinkles from setting in. Other fabrics will need to drip dry, again in a safe place.

•Press: When the fabric is thoroughly dry, it will need pressed to set the grain. This pressing area can be in the laundry room, or in your sewing area, near your machine. Depending on the size of the fabric piece, you can press it on a full-sized ironing board, a table that has been padded with towels and a clean sheet, or a non-stick pressing sheet , which can be laid on a table or counter. In fact, a non-stick pressing sheet can become nearly indispensable near your sewing machine for touching up small pieces such as a single quilt block, or a collar or sleeve that is partially constructed. If this sheet is close-by, it quickly becomes habit to press each seam as it is sewn, rather than waiting until several are ready to press before carrying them all at once to the ironing board.

•Cut: Have an area that is a comfortable height for cutting patterns. This area can be a small table and chair, if you mainly work with small pieces of fabric or it can be a special cutting table. What is important is that it be a comfortable height and that you have good lighting. In the sewing room, this table can double as a pressing area. Be sure to cover the surface with a pad and your pressing sheet.

•Assemble: Whether you are sewing curtains or a prom dress, piecing a quilt block, hand-quilting a pillow, or creating a counted cross-stitch wall hanging, you need space for a comfortable chair, a table or frames at a comfortable height, and good lighting. Keep your tools close-by in a covered basket.

When your workspace is planned out according to the multiple tasks involved, when each area is conveniently located, and your tools are organized and close at hand, you will be able to relax and focus on your hobby. Your family will be able to enjoy your completed projects more quickly because you will be working more efficiently, and they will agree that it was worth the time and effort to organize the sewing/craft room.


Author Vincent Platania represents the Fuller Brush Company. Fuller Brush has been in business since 1906, and offers safe, environmentally friendly products for keeping your home and your body clean. Visit http://www.fuller-brush-products.com

5 Tips on Organizing a Room for the Holidays

Whether you are expecting friends from out of town or just want to rearrange the furniture for your holiday bash, the following are some tips you may want to keep in mind.

1. Don't move anything without a plan.

You don't want to find out that after you moved the large furniture around, you can't seem to fit the small table and the chair that always sat in the corner of the room. Take measurements when necessary and if you must, try sketching your plan on a notepad.

2. Avoid asking anyone's opinion or assistance until you know what you are doing.

One of the biggest frustrations for anyone is to be asked to assist a relative or friend with a project only to find out that the organizer doesn't have a clue what he or she is doing.

3. Check your bank account.

You may find there are some things you may need for your home such as: a bookshelf, small table, area rug, or something larger like an entertainment center. If so, you don't want to find out at the last minute that you can't afford to get any of these things. Add your desired piece of furniture to your list. Also, consider buying used rather than new if money is going to be a problem. Check auction sites, discount stores, and even consider posting an ad in a newspaper or post a flier in a public place stating what you are seeking and what you are willing to pay.

4. Talk to guests prior to the event to find out what they will be bringing and how long exactly they will be staying.

Sometimes you may find your guest will either be bringing more or less than what you originally thought. He or she may not be traveling with the partner and children. If so, you don't want to rearrange everything only to find that your time could have been better used elsewhere like planning a great meal.

Lastly, after you have created a plan, got an idea of what you will need, secured a helping hand, and most of all know how much you intend to spend, look for items within your home you simply don't use and donate them to charities in your local area.

Nicholl McGuire

Tips To Organize Your Shed

To begin any task of organization there must be planning involved. It is better to be realistic in your plans of organizing your shed, than to defeat yourself by attempting more than you are able to finish within a certain amount of time. Be patient with yourself and take into account all the different issues that are cared for as you go about organizing your shed. Organizing your shed a step at a time helps you not to become discouraged.

First, you must decide how you will use your shed, what will go in it for storage and what will not. Designate a few boxes for collecting items that you no longer need or want. You should mark these boxes so that you do not get them confused. Anything that is still useful that you no longer want, just give to a friend, neighbor or charitable organization. All unwanted items or any item, which has reached an expiration date, is best disposed of properly. Once items have been determined as unwanted, they should be done away with either giving away or by proper disposal. Do not for any reason bring these items back into the shed that you are organizing, all items must leave the area as soon as possible so as not the chance of returning to a nicely organized shed. With all unnecessary items out of the way, you should have gained a bit of floor and shelf space.

With a few good tips, your shed will be an example of organization perfection before you know it.

1. Start on one side or in one area, taking all the time, you need to clear items out of the way and to place items where they belong. This is a de-cluttering stage.

2. There are many little trick and recyclable ways to use things that are helpful in organizing a shed, such as nailing an old leather belt along the edge of a shelf or the back of a door to hang hand tools on. You can also take small baby food jars and nail the lids to the bottom of a shelf and the store small item such as nails and screws in the jars and twist them in place for handy storage.

3. Hang a pegboard along one side of the shed to hand items such as hand tools, extension cords and paintbrushes or even mops, brooms and shovels. A cloth shoe rack hung over the inside of a shed door makes available pockets for storing many items.

4. Any oil spots or stains can be removed by pouring clean cat litter or white sand over the area to soak up extra fluids.

5. Old trunks, desks and dressers often find a new use as storage areas inside a shed. These are good for storing small tools or lawn and garden supplies.

6. You can always add a few more shelves or even a couple of rods and hooks or bins to increase the amount of space for organizing store areas.

7. Magnetic strips can be placed along any storage area that would hold any stray metal item.

8. Just, remember to take it a little at a time, and is you want and can get help, be sure to designate a few jobs for helpers while organizing your shed and keeping it looking in tiptop shape.


Hunter Pyle is a writer for Taylor Gifts squidoo.com/taylorgifts and Get Organized! shopgetorganized.com.

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