Plastic bags. You can love them or hate them, or experience even a mixture of both responses to them.
Somehow they seem to keep coming in the front door here. Even though we have reusable cloth bags for a trip to the supermarket or library, or whichever place we are toddling off to, somehow we still seem to end up with a collection of plastic bags.
There are a number of ways people choose to store them. Some people keep them in a designated holder, others may let them all accumulate in a particular drawer or cupboard.
Plastic bags are more often than not shoved, twisted, contorted and stored in a variety of places, within any home or work setting, according to what works best at the time and keeps them quickly accessible.
There is sure to be a suggestion or two, available via Pinterest and the greater World Wide Web, as to how you can possibly store plastic bags in a way that meets your particular fanciful preference.
There will be some means of storage and organisation, possibly even for each and every plastic bag that exists, and which would no doubt help make someone feel that they have indeed responded particularly well to Plastic Bag Organisation 101! (All the best to those that want to go down that path.)
As time and energy are precious, we have always
needed to find something fairly standard and straight forward, to deal to
the plastic bag clutter that seems to accumulate at times in our household.
There has been an ongoing need to find what works best in terms of keeping things fairly orderly, plus also readily accessible and available, in order to re-purpose and recycle plastic bags.
When our children were somewhat younger, it was recommended as a good idea to tie each plastic bag with a knot more or less in the middle. It was deemed a proactive means of preventing an inquisitive, naive child from suffocating themselves. This was by all accounts at the time, an effective means also of keeping each bag somewhat tidy and easily obtainable, amongst a mass of others.
So for some time, I diligently did just that very thing. Every time a plastic bag somehow ventured in to our home, it was always duly knotted up and then put with all it's brothers and sisters, into one particular large plastic bag.
This larger bag, with all it's bulging contents, would then end up located in various parts of the house. Be it the garage, the study... wherever was deemed best, and there it would land and remain; until it's contents were next required.
Like all good things though, it came to an end. What had initially worked well, simply became an overflowing cascading mass of plastic-ness.
This cascading mass over time started to really grate my desire to be organized. Every time I spotted this heaving overflow of plastic lurking in the study or garage (or wherever it last got designated to be), it irked me.
Enough is enough!
I finally gave in.
A friend had told me about a method of dealing to plastic bags, that a relative of hers used to rectify inevitable plastic clutter by the all too familiar plastic bags.
I tried for so long to resist the urge to take it on board. Folding every plastic bags into an origami-type wonder?! Who has the time for that?!
Yet, as I say, I finally succumbed.
Over time I attacked the mass of plastic-ness, bag by bag. Bag by bag, an origami-type wonder was produced every so often, when a moment in time was available to do so.
Yes, it took time to do the big catch up that was needed to deal to the bulging mass of bags that had taken up residence in our very own house.
Yet, as any additional bag came to be located in our neck-of-the-woods, I would simply (and somewhat masterly after having folded a few), quickly deal to making each and every folded and compacted bag pretty much a perfect match to all it's brothers and sisters.
The resulting outcome was so much more visually blissful!
It is a very orderly means of storing them. It is all less overwhelming, simply due to the nature of the uniformity of having each bag being so compact.
I have found that the time and energy it takes now to fold up any incoming plastic bag is minimal.
When anyone needs a plastic bag, all that is required is a quick peek in the designated box in the Expedit. With hardly any rummage, a quick location of a bag occurs and they are then easily unfurled, ready to be put to use again.
Each folded up little parcel of a bag is compact and neat. It takes up less space to now store them.
By taking barely a minute or two to fold them down into a compact, quickly pocket-able form, it helps to also create less spatial and visual clutter while they are stored. It makes them easy to transport from place to place as needed also.
To date, this new approach to organising these plastic hold-alls has already proven to be effective. Each bag is able to be quickly folded and unfolded, and used again and again, without much hassle at all.
Several of them can even be kept in a small purse or pocket, if so desired in one's handbag also, all the while taking up very little room.
Neat, tidy, compact and organised. Able to be unfolded and quickly put back into circulation: it is proving to be a win-win solution all round!
Check out the next blog post in this series titled Clutter Busters.....
The next blog post is a step-by-step photographic tutorial on how to do the exact same quick and very compact organisation manoeuvre on your own collection of plastic bags.
This simple method for compacting and storing plastic bags, may also make a significant difference on the organization front for you and your own household!
Happy folding folks!
