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I love my reusable shopping bags, and I even have some from travels around the world.
But! What do I do with this mass of bags?
I’ve pared them down to the minimum we need and use the most, but I can’t stand the mess of them stuffed in the cabinet (as they, unfortunately, currently, are).
Any cool ideas for organizing re-usable shopping bags? Have you figured out a way to keep them neat? -Kristin
We keep half of ours in a tall basket next to the door with our umbrellas and the other half are in my car! The hubs never remembers to use them, so he just has one in his car. 😛
I work at a Montessori school with ages 3 to 6. I have seen parents use them as wet bags for soiled clothes and to carry napping supplies!
We have the bag-o-bags in our kitchen, and a bag-o-bags in each car, but we still seem to never have them when we need them…so I started sneakily using resuable bags to carry routine items that might normally not have their own bag, but without which we can’t ever leave the house. Basically, we picked something from my purse or my husband’s pockets that everyone in the family uses or needs, and now that bag is always someone’s responsibility. We have a reusable shopping bag with a single tube of sunscreen, water, and a bottle of bugspray during summer, and a chapstick, extra gloves, and thick socks during the winter…so there is always at least one reusable grocery bag around because we can easily shuffle the extra stuff to make room for new purchases.
We also have WAY TOO MANY reusable bags, but I hit on a good idea for using the spares: organizing the closet! We put our winter clothes, spare yarn, etc. in reusable bags and then put them on the shelves in the closet. That really helped to organize the closet and prevent our kitties from knocking down all the things when they climb around on the shelves.
For organizing our other bags, we just put them in one large reusable bag. I find them handy to cushion fragile things when moving, so we keep some in our basement storage space. The ones that are used regularly are scattered all over our car trunk at the moment.
I hang my prettiest ones on coat hangers and use them all over the house to store things. I have one in my closet which houses all my socks. I have a hanging rail in my sewing room and I have clothes hangers with reusable bags hanging off them to store all my different colours of scrap material. Super easy to access and means the prettiest reusable bags get a more glamorous life than being stuck inside another bag! X
Similar to others in the post, I have one of the larger ones on top of the refrigerator, filled with all the others. In our last home we had them all folded and shoved on a smallish shelf.
I have 5 reusable bags and when I come home from the store and unload my stuff, I put them all inside one of the bags and hang that bag on a hook. THEN, the next time out the door I take my bag of bags and put them in my car. That way, they are there waiting to be used. Since I live 45 minutes from the nearest grocery store I also keep a cooler in the trunk to put cold groceries in, in the summer. Meat, cheese, milk, ice cream, frozen veggies etc. I put the bags in the cooler.
We found a second-hand wicker hamper at our local Goodwill to store our reusable bags in. It lives in the foyer of our condo. Every so often I stash some in our car (for use when we go on our major shopping trips)… usually these are those super-durable, shiny ones you can get from Trader Joes. The fabric ones usually live in the hamper so they’re accessible when we want to hoof it to to one of the stores within walking distance.
Instead of sticking my bags on a hook, I clip them to one of these (recommended by Offbeat Home!):
http://offbeathome.com/2012/05/make-grocery-shopping-easier
At the moment they’re clipped to a rod in the closet. The brand of grocery shopping bag holder that I have isn’t the sturdiest, so I would be careful clipping it to things because the bags can fall off. But it’s great for when I want to clip them someplace handy so I’ll remember them, and then I always remember the bag holder too!
They all live inside one bag, which lives inside the thermal bag; it means that the thermal bag can easily be used for cold foods, but without wasting the space inside during storage. All of that lives in my car. But since my car is 2 floors down and out back now, there’s a hook on the bottom of the coat rack they live on between emptying groceries and the next time we go back downstairs (or, more likely, the next time Hallway cleaning comes around on the To Do list).
If we forget to take them inside the store: We put everything unbagged back into the cart, and bag them at the car. If they didn’t make it into the car, sometimes we get paper bags and sometimes we just put everything in the trunk, run inside & grab the bags to carry everything inside with. That last happened exactly ONCE and my partner (whose job it is to deal with carrying in the groceries) decided it was Never Happening AGAIN and made sure the bags get back to the car on time ;).
Stumbled across this idea in my search for organising ideas… Folding them and placing them in a cute basket. much better than all jammed messily in one of the bigger bags. These days everything gets placed in cute little baskets! Why not! http://www.modernparentsmessykids.com/how-to-organize-reusable-bags/
I have the ones I use regularly on hooks in the kitchen. Then I’ve got a bag of bags shoved in a closet somewhere. The reason I haven’t gotten rid of them in a housecleaning purge is because I use them every time we move. This won’t work the greatest for long-distance moves, but for in-town moves it allows you to use fewer boxes.