AnchorMommy

What to do with extra wine corks

July 28, 2009 by Shannon

I am certain that no one will nominate me for Mom of the Year with this blog entry.

But let’s be honest here. I have a lot of wine corks at my house. And since I always have big plans to do something crafty with them but never do, I find other ways to use them. A couple of my solutions have proven to be good toddlerproofing techniques. Yeah, I feel kinda weird using wine corks to toddlerproof my house. But who cares, as long as it works.

Wine Cork Use #1: Cabinet Knob

We have a piece of cheap furniture in our house that stores a bunch of Kellan’s toys, and one cabinet door in particular is open and shut, open and shut, open and shut countless times a day. The door handle just fell off after a while, and I wasn’t able to repair it immediately.

Enter the wine cork! Rather than move all the toys out of the cabinet and declare it off limits, I screwed on a cork! It bought me enough time to fix the knob, and served as a constant reminder that I couldn’t procrastinate the repair. Having a wine cork on your kid’s toy cabinet is kinda embarrassing.

Wine Cork Use #2: Door Lock Disabler

We’re spending a lot of time in the backyard lately, and so is Kellan. Actually, he’s spending a lot of time going in and out of the sliding glass door, now that he’s old enough to open it himself. But he’s also old enough to flip the lever down that locks the sliding glass door, and he LOVES to do that while his daddy and I are outside.

So rather than play a game of “be a good boy and unlock the door…please???” I disable the locking mechanism with a trusty wine cork. I just use a strip of masking tape to hold it inside the door jam and up high enough that Kellan’s little fingers can’t reach it. The cork still allows the door to shut (and keep all the nice cool air conditioning inside), but the lock can’t latch. When we’re done on the patio, I just remove the cork and stick it on the wall, behind the curtain. That way, it’s hidden but always there when I step out on the patio with — what else? A glass of wine.

Wine Cork Use #3: Picture Hanger

This solution is the only reason I’m able to hang a wreath on my fireplace every year at Christmas. Our ranch home has a stone fireplace and rather than curse up a storm every year by trying to hammer a nail into the grout, I wedge in a wine cork and screw a simple cup hook into the other end. Then I can hang whatever I want on the fireplace — no smashed thumbs, no swearing (otherwise known as “Christmas language”). 

So there you go. My top three uses for wine corks. Now what to do with the other 200? Care to share your ideas?