So you have decluttered your home! Now you have a bunch of piles of donate, sell, keep or trash. Before you run off to the donate centre to eliminate the stuff from your life permanently, why not take a second QUICK look. Do you have anything you can repurpose? Use for something else? Sometimes you need to see things through a pair of kid eyes!

When I was decluttering my bathroom I found a couple brand new shower curtains. I had them in my donate pile still when I happen to read an idea where you turn shower curtains into play mats or drawing sheets for kids. So we suddenly had a brand new Lego mat for the kids! They love it still. The shower curtain is plain white and we are using white board markers to add landscape to our Lego play time. We have yet to see if it wipes off ok, I am told it does! Anytime I ask the kids if we can wipe it clean and start over, they say “no! We just have to add to it!” It is looking quite messy but they love it!

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It’s so great to look through the eyes of a child! They see possibility everywhere!!

The number of times that my kids ask me if I have a specific kind of cardboard box suggests that we don’t put much cardboard in our recycling! It always amazes me to see what they come up with. The sky is truly the limit! They have made forts, rocket packs, a garage for cars, ramps, slides, monster shoes, stilts, even gumball machines!

Use other recycling items for fun too, like tin cans. My kids often make drums out of tins. My youngest even made a dumbbell for working out by sticking paper to either end of an empty can!

Also, if you buy in bulk at places like Costco, there are tons of possibilities. I bought one sleeve of the red solo cups a long time ago. We used them at some parties in the past, but we still have a TON! The kids have access to about 30 of the cups. They stack them to make pyramids, or Lego forts, flower pots for real or fake plants, make a bath for toys, or use them for nerf gun targets!

There are also a number of crafty type things you can do with your kids, especially if you accumulate a lot of one type of thing. We go through toilet paper, it seems too fast! I am always finding toilet paper cardboard tubes all over! A quick Pinterest search of “what to do with…” will come up with a ton of ideas!!!

Make things fun!

Get creative with your fun, by using stuff you are decluttering from your house to create new ways to play.

Even adults can play! Use your organizing tools in new ways, like my cd rack as a Tupperware lid holder. Use craft storage bins in the bathroom. I have even repurposed some desktop file holders for all sorts of purposes, ranging from my school papers, to calendars and chore tracking papers, to making it a shelf on a book shelf, to using it to sort the kids online school papers. Binders are another item I am always torn to get rid of. My kids have used some of my old binders as their recipe books, to hold trading cards of sorts, even to make their own games using wipeable plastic page protector sheets. I have repurposed some binders to store some of my crafting supplies, like little bits of scrapbooking papers in zipper plastic sleeves.

Sometimes you may have to dig deep for ideas, like using a shoe cubby for standing up rolls of wrapping paper, or using k-cups as seed starting cups, or using an egg carton as a cupboard riser for a spice shelf! Have an old bucket lying around? Use it to store a coiled up extension cord. Use a hose reel for Christmas lights! There are so many ideas out there, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

Getting rid of clutter is definitely still the priority.

I am in no way suggesting that you actually keep everything you have already thought of getting rid of. I am rather suggesting that if you think about the stuff you are getting rid of, you may be able to find new life for it within your home. If you can’t think of any other use, then it’s time to say good bye to the item! It’s not worth keeping around if you truly have no use for it!

Enjoy re-enjoying your stuff!

Thanks for coming home!