I can come up with some great solutions.
Really.
But the hidden ones rarely work.
While I’d love for my house to look perfect at all times, some of the ways we make things work keep it from looking perfect.
Half-full (or worse, ALMOST full) water bottles grate on my nerves. I try to avoid letting them happen, but they happen. To keep from wasting the nobody’s-gonna-to-drink-it-now water, we use it to water the plants.
Actually, Hubby does. In our house, he’s the one who handles NOT killing plants.
When one of the irritating bottles appears, everyone knows to take it to a certain spot in the breakfast area.
But as I found when I decluttered/switched-out-old-storage-containers-for-new-ones recently, I once had the really great idea to put them in a less obvious spot. A logical spot.
Logical + Less Obvious = Doesn’t Work ‘Round Here.
Really, it would be so nice if those eyesores could be two feet away, hidden inside a cabinet.
Oh well.
__________________________________
Go declutter something, ANYthing, right now! Take a picture and follow the instructions here to enter to win a $500 Home Depot giftcard from Extra Space Storage here! No before pictures necessary!!
--Nony
I have to have things out for visual reminders too. It drives my mom nuts and she’s the one who always suggests putting things in less ovbious, but logical places. It doesn’t work for me… I have to have visual reminders or I forget things…
When I look closely, I see TWO water bottles in there! Partially used bottles drive me nuts around here. Especially when they come inside from a vehicle, having been started on a road trip, and then I hear from the children how thirsty they are when we next go out and about. If they’d just left their bottle in the van to finish drinking…… I do better with visual reminders, but we have run out of space for those sorts of things. The miscellaneous is what is KILLING us.
I prefer to have water readily available in the car too. But we can only do that for a couple months in the spring and another couple months in the fall. Summer and winter it is too hot or too cold.
Yep, I saw two bottles too.
Yea, partially full water bottles drive me nuts too. There’s just me and my young teen daughter in my household, so I know whose it is (not mine!). So if I find them lying around I put them in the fridge and insist she finish one before opening another. Sometimes successful, other times not. If I had a bigger family and didn’t know whose bottle it was, I’d really go nuts.
Have you tried filtered tap water (or gallon bottles if that’s not a good option in your area) and refillable bottles for each family member? Wondering how that works for others.
We go back and forth. We’ll do great for a while only using reusable, and then for “convenience” get back in the habit of buying packs of water. Usually, it’s when the car is getting crazy-messy that we start “losing” all the reusables in there.
I have the same problem. My solution… I keep a pretty glass pitcher on the counter that I empty the water bottles into. Then I can put the plastic bottles straight into the recycle bin. I use the water pitcher to fill the dogs’ bowls. They like it better than the chlorinated tap water and it doesn’t feel wasteful. I would use it to water indoor plants too, if I had any. Keeping the kids & dogs alive is enough of a challenge for me. Plants wouldn’t stand a chance.
That’s a GREAT idea, Valerie!!
Oh I hate putting things were it makes more sense to keep them – and then I can never remember where that place is. I’m currently trying to find something I REALLY need, but the only thing I remember about it is I put it somewhere more ‘logical.’ But what was logical to my brain the day I did it is apparently NOT quite as apparent today. :/
I have worked out the bottled water waste. don’t buy the stuff. use the filtered water on frig or in sink. save all kinds of earth treasures that way.
I despise half full water bottles. I fill up the dog’s bowl with the leftovers or water plants. If the bowl is full and the plants are wet, I just dump and recycle. We use reusable water bottles at home/on the go, so the half full plastic bottles come from outside locations, and I’m not willing to store them AT ALL.
Drinking from an opened water bottle, even if you’re drinking from a bottle you opened and used, isn’t recommended, at least after a few days. It’s inevitable that there’s some “backwash” which contains contaminants….and they will flourish and grow, grow, grow!
Not about water bottles, but I bought a (fairly expensive) Star Trek Journal thingy Yule present for a co-worker in July a couple of years back. Now, I’m pretty good about designated places for things, but I couldn’t find it in ANY of the places I would put future Yule presents in when it came time for Yule in December… TWO YEARS of looking for that dang thing… finally found it… in the pile of journals… logical? maybe… findable? nope.
He got his Yule present in March… two years late… still loved it though…
This is old, so you may already have a solution, but what about a pretty and open container where the bottles already are?
Sorry, but I’m not sure the water bottle is the main problem in that cabinet. Some of the other stuff looks like it would be hard to pull out without an avalanche. 😉