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Home » Food & Kitchen » 7 “Not Their Original Purpose” Items in Our Kitchen

7 “Not Their Original Purpose” Items in Our Kitchen

August 28, 2014 By Deb 14 Comments

Kitchen GadgetsWe all love shortcuts, new ideas, and creative inventions that save us time, cost us little to nothing, and make us say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”  To be honest, I’m not that imaginative. BUT, I do like to save money and hate to waste something that could be put to use somewhere in the house. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, so here are just a few simple things we do in our kitchen to reuse items in order to save some crumbs.  Maybe you’ll find some of them useful in yours too.

1. Plate Holder = Convenient Recipe Stand

You can buy all sorts of fancy cookbook holders and stands out there, but you’ll pay a pretty penny. I found this plastic plate holder for a dollar and use it to hold up my cookbooks or pretty much anything else that will fit!

 Plate Holder 1 Cookbook

Of course, as you can tell, it’s a bit cheap since it was only a dollar, so it tends to topple over with thick or very tall cookbooks. But it’s the perfect size for a tablet. This way, you can cook, get your hands dirty, and still have the recipe propped up and in good eye’s view. A bonus is that it folds and I can keep it neatly in the cup that holds my pens.

2. Oatmeal Cartons = Grain Silos

Since we make our own granola and buy our oats at ALDI, we end up with lots of cardboard oatmeal cartons. They have a nice snug lid, are fairly large (42 oz), and make great containers for our other grains which we buy in bulk (especially rice).

Oatmeal Carton

3. Detergent Lid = Perfect Size Grain Scoop

Were you admiring my little scooper dooper that I use to ladle out my rice? I hope so, because guess what!? Here’s where it came from, so you probably have lots of potential scoopers sitting around at your own house too!

 Scoop Lid

You may find a nifty scoop like this on something other than your detergent. A lot of things come with nice plastic lids that are just about the size of a 1 cup measuring cup.

4. Ice Cream Spoon = Ideal Sugar Spoon

Speaking of scoops, whenever Al and I get our free ice cream cones at Baskin-Robbins for our birthdays, those little pink spoons come home with us. Since I keep my sugar in a wide-mouthed container for cooking, the ice cream spoon gets transferred from scooping one sweet thing to another!

Ice Cream Spoon

5. Scrap Sticker Sheets = Cut-out Freezer Labels

If you’ve ever printed address labels at Christmas time or CD/DVD labels, you’ve probably ended up with a bunch of sheets with big chunks of sticker leftover around the corners. It’s more than a little painful to throw it away all that nice white sticker still untouched around the edges, isn’t it? Well, don’t waste it anymore! Cut out sections (like I’ve already done in the picture below) to label your food in the freezer (or anywhere else you can use small labels).

 Labels Freeze

Just don’t let the bags get too wet or the labels won’t stick as well. I usually double bag all my smaller bags of frozen foods in a larger bag to keep things organized, so it also helps to keep the labels dry and in place.

6. Rubber Wristband = Handy Jar Opener

Did you ever get one of these for admission to a park or as a marketing gimmick at a convention?

 Band Can

Rubber bands are great for a lot of things, but these large ones are especially perfect for twisting off hard-to-open lids. Wrap a wide rubber band around the lid, twist with the rubber band as grip, and the stubborn lid almost always pops right open! (By the way, this is also a great way to impress the opposite sex of your brute strength.)

7. Tissue Boxes = Ultimate Bag Organizers

We keep most of our plastic grocery bags, but we also keep 1) produce bags (the thinner ones in the produce department, which especially come in handy when we share vegetables from our garden with our neighbors), 2) small plastic grocery bags, and 3) bread bags (for homemade bread and because I double bag frozen bread).

As you can imagine, with this great assortment of different kinds of bags getting all mixed up together, bags would be flying everywhere as I pawed through the 75 Walmart bags and 15 bread bags in frantic efforts to find the produce bag at the very bottom. What a mess! But with our new tissue box reorganization, this is what it looks like now:

 Boxes Bags

We’ve separated the types of bags and stuffed them into empty tissue boxes. Now, finding a produce bag is a calm, quick, flick of the wrist as I pull a plastic bag through its convenient dispensing slot  (oh yeah, and notice that spiffy label?).

These are just a few of the tips and tricks we use in our kitchen. I’m sure if we all walked through our kitchens, into our closets, or rummaged through our drawers, we’d find tons of other creative things we’ve learned from our moms or through the trials and errors of life.

How about you? Do you do any of these? We’d love to hear any tips and tricks you do in your house and maybe we’ll start doing them in ours too!

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Filed Under: Food & Kitchen, Tips & Tricks Tagged With: diy, food, kitchen

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Comments

  1. Joelle says

    August 28, 2014 at 4:22 pm

    We get Vegenaise by the gallon from Azure Standard and I repurpose the big plastic gallon afterwards to store other bulk foods. Last gallon jar proved to be a good cashew storage container! (Same idea as what you do with your quick oats containers.)

    Reply
    • Deb says

      August 28, 2014 at 5:37 pm

      That sounds like it would be a great storage container, especially with a screw lid. Big, plastic containers like that are always so useful, I wish I had more of them!

      Reply
  2. debs (@debtdebs) says

    August 28, 2014 at 5:00 pm

    You are really resourceful! My type of resourcefulness in this regard involved saving the pizza topper stands (the things that stop the box from sticking to the pizza) and lids from tubes to become Barbie coffee tables and coffee cups for my kids. Ya that’s about it.

    Reply
    • Deb says

      August 28, 2014 at 5:40 pm

      Haha, well that is resourceful too (I can just imagine how cute those little coffee tables were)! We haven’t had kids yet, so beware of the crazy creativity once we do! 🙂

      Reply
  3. Mrs. Frugalwoods says

    August 28, 2014 at 9:42 pm

    Love these ideas! I do variations on #7 all over the house. I have random re-used boxes cut and configured into drawer organizers everywhere. Works great!

    Reply
    • Deb says

      August 28, 2014 at 10:01 pm

      That’s a great idea, you must be wonderfully organized! I should keep more of my boxes and reshape them like you do. I’m just afraid with my OCD tendencies I’ll want to keep every empty shoebox, tissue box, Amazon box, toilet paper and paper towel roll! 🙂

      Reply
  4. Leilana says

    August 29, 2014 at 10:05 am

    We do a variation on the oatmeal carton idea-granola container! I often make homemade granola and the oatmeal carton is perfect for storing it in.
    Also, I love reusing jars that held things like spaghetti sauce, vegannaise, or pickles and making them into cute little holders for everything from Q-tips in the bathroom to a vase in the kitchen or a pencil/pen holder in the office. Just add a ribbon or glue on a piece of burlap (after cleaning and removing any labels of course) and voila! there’s your crafty, cute, vintage looking holder for free!

    Reply
    • Deb says

      August 29, 2014 at 12:01 pm

      Oh, your little jars sound so cute, Leilana! I would imagine those would work well as centerpieces for an outdoorsy type wedding too!

      Reply
  5. Daisy @ Prairie Eco Thrifter says

    August 30, 2014 at 7:54 pm

    Wow, these are all very thrifty ideas; love it! I love to use the tops of bottles as pouring tools for things like rice, oatmeal, etc. WE also used a spice rack that used to have the spices hanging from it, as a hanger for smaller metal kitchen tools like measuring spoons, cups, peelers, etc.

    Reply
    • Deb says

      August 31, 2014 at 11:27 am

      My measuring spoons and cups tend to get all mixed up in my drawer. Hanging them sounds like a splendid idea!

      Reply
  6. Jason @ Phroogal says

    August 31, 2014 at 5:08 pm

    These are great ideas. I’ve been using rubber bands to help open up some jars but didn’t think of larger wristbands.

    Reply
    • Deb says

      August 31, 2014 at 6:49 pm

      Isn’t it amazing how well it works? (Personally, I need the biggest rubber band I can get to make up for my lack of muscle.) 🙂

      Reply
  7. Pam says

    October 23, 2016 at 12:56 pm

    I use double or triple produce bags or grocery/Walmart bags for bread. I also use grocery/Walmart bags in my trash cans as liners. I have been using large mesh fruit bags (that grapefruit came it) to hold my plastic grocery sacks, but I like the Kleenex box idea better. I’ll have to save my next Kleenex boxes… only thing is it takes me forever to go through a kleenex box! Thanks for the great ideas. I just found your blog recently after listening to Audioverse recordings of Al’s GYC finance seminar. I love your blog and the seminar, thanks for sharing!

    Reply
    • Deb says

      October 25, 2016 at 8:08 am

      Hey, Pam! I really like your idea with the mesh fruit bags. The Kleenex box is convenient but the mesh bag would hold a lot more and my bags are starting to overflow! 🙂 Glad you found the blog and are enjoying it!

      Reply

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