Dare to DIY With A New Supply: Cereal Box to Lint Box

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Jen, over at I Heart Organizing, is hosting a challenge “daring” us to try organizing with a new supply. In other words, use something you have never used before. As you may know, I am currently working on our laundry room, as it was in desperate need of some love and attention. During the process I have been able to try a couple new supplies: I used yarn for the first time (DIY Wool Dryer Balls) and Epoxy Appliance Paint (Painting the Dryer). However, these items are kinda “normal”. I decided to step up my game and use a cereal box (new supply) as a way to keep our laundry room neat and tidy.

I have given myself a total of $100 to redo the laundry room. That’s not a whole lot when you’re painting the walls, painting the dryer, making a shelf, adding storage, etc. As of yesterday’s post, I have spent just under $58.

One thing I really wanted to do, was come up with a solution for our dryer lint. For the past 5+ years, this was my “solution”:

Ummm… yuck! Perhaps I should explain that my laundry “room” is actually a laundry closet, and there is literally no room. This over-sized trash can, shoved between the wall and dryer, is where I tossed all my dryer lint. (According to the above photo, I wasn’t even doing a good job because my dryer is covered in lint… To be fair, this was a before shot of the laundry room and I believe every before shot should include real life photos. No cleaning up. No tidying. Real. Life.)

Because I have such a tight budget, I needed a cheap solution to fix this disaster of a trash can. Enter the cereal box. A Costco-sized Honey Nut Cheerios box to be exact. I headed outside (and who wouldn’t when it was 70°… in Minnesota… in November?) and grabbed some spray paint, two large decorative clothespins I had found at Michael’s, and some dark stain.

I cut the flaps off the top of the cereal box and painted it with a hammered metal spray paint. Then, I stained the clothes pins.

Once everything was dry, I decided I really needed to spruce up the box a bit, so I headed to my craft bin and found some sticker letters I had leftover from a previous project.

Luckily, I had the letters to spell out L-I-N-T, so I applied them to the box, using a ruler to make sure it was straight and centered.

It still needed something, so I added a strip of washi tape around the top.

Using Command Strips, I secured the clothespins up on the wall. (For some reason, I had a little trouble with the strips sticking to the wood clothespins… I lost the directions to the Command Strips, so maybe they don’t do well on wood? I found that sanding the area where I was going to apply the strip was helpful.)

Then I hung the box, using the clothespins.

What I love, is that when the box is full of lint, I can unclip it from the clothespins, empty the lint from the box, and clip it back up again. So much better than that trash can!

If you are looking for some cost-effective storage solutions for your pantry, I’ve got a lot of those too.

Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your day!