Hello friends! This article is part of a series of articles I’m in the process of writing on the subject of finding creative ways to reuse and repurpose common, everyday household items.
For my latest project I decided to create a toilet paper roll kitchen organizer,
as detailed below. I did this partly because:
A. I am a little strange… I admit it.
and
B. Because I already had a pretty country-style basket that had been lying around the house forever, that I didn’t want to go to waste. I hadn’t been able to think of any other use for it, and was in love with the cool geometric pattern of the interwoven pieces that make up the sides of the basket.
Now that I got that off my chest – below is a quick rundown of how I created this organizer! 🙂
First off I found an attractive container that I would eventually put the toilet paper rolls (or tubes) into, then gathered up a whole bunch o’ TP rolls. With the basket I wound up using it happened to be fairly deep, so in order to push the rolls up higher within the basket (so they come up even with the rim) I folded up some thick fabric and placed that at the bottom of the basket:
Small side note here: I could easily have been done with the project in about 10 minutes if I had decided at that point to just stick all of the TP tubes into the basket, make sure they were nice and upright – and voila! Project Done. All I would need to do at this point is fill each tube with something like a pencil, ruler, spatula, etc.
So please bear in mind that this project could either take almost NO time at all — or it could take weeks, which is what happened in my case. It took me weeks because I decided to cover every single tube with some kind of fabric or other. And I did that because I had this bag of cloth scraps that had also been lying around forever and I didn’t want it all to go to waste! (waste not, want not, as they say). Truthfully, it took me weeks to cover all of the rolls with cloth only b/c I work during the day and I fit in my craft projects during my spare time. Thus, if you ever venture to try this project it wouldn’t necessarily take you that long.
OK. Next (in an effort to make the TP tubes slightly nicer and not so tacky/cheap looking) I measured out a long rectangle of fabric that was long enough to wrap around the tube:
Then I folded the cloth around each tube and glued the edges of the cloth (or fabric… what’s the difference between “cloth” and “fabric anyway??) securely with fabric glue. I made sure to have enough cloth to spare at the top and bottom of each tube, so that I could fold the cloth down inside the tubes:
After folding the cloth down and in, I glued it again inside each tube (the folded-in part of the cloth was about 2-3 inches):
Lastly I loaded up all of the lovely, decorated toilet paper rolls into my basket. I have tons of brushes and other art supplies so I tried it that way first:
That actually worked out really well, but it seemed like the style of the basket lent itself better to being a kitchen utensil organizer, so that’s what I ultimately settled on. Here’s how it’s currently being used in my kitchen:
Now that’s livin’ on a budget for ya!! Even though this organizer thing isn’t fancy, I still like it because it keeps all my utensils and kitchen tools nicely separated out. Here’s how all that stuff looked before (crammed into one container):
Well, that’s about it! On to the next repurposing project!
Here are a few more possible uses for this item:
- Use this organizer to store other types of tall, skinny items in bunches – such as pencils, pens, rulers, and other school-related supplies.
- You could place a bunch of toilet paper rolls into a more plain container (even a cardboard box) and place long or skinny tools (such as screwdrivers, wires, long nails, etc.) into each roll.
Please share this article if you liked it (or thought it was just plain weird) – and let me know if you have any experiences in repurposing everyday items. 🙂
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Please drop a comment below if you have any creative alternate uses for this household item, and thank you so much for reading!
