I keep my trash can in my pantry. I know that I probably shouldn't keep trash next to the food we eat, but I don't really have a choice. I would put it at the end of my counter, but then everything the two little ones pick up would end up in there. They love to pick things up and put them in other things. Sometimes, when it's time to pick up toys, they can be very helpful. They also love to take containers and turn them upside down so everything spills out, so sometimes they are the opposite of helpful.
So to protect our valuables, I keep the trash can in the pantry. They don't yet understand that Mama's phone should not be thrown away and the pretty external hard drive should not be thrown away - the one with all our photos, that I almost didn't catch was thrown away. I don't know if I missed anything that was thrown away, but I probably have. That's why I keep the trash can in the pantry, next to our food, that I also protect from being ransacked by insane kids who think it's ok to dump an entire bag of food on the floor and play in it.
I really wanted to have my trash bags off the shelves so I could have more room for food storage. I found out that I could buy a bag holder for around $20, but that seems like a lot of money to spend on something to hold trash bags. The one that I want is found here. I also found that I could use a dowel rod or a paper towel holder of some sort and put the rod through the center of my trash bag roll. Well, the skinny dowel rod won't fit. Or at least not very well. I could have gone smaller, but then I was worried it would break from the weight of my bags. So I decided I would use a shoe string I had lying around. It's a heavy duty one, made for hiking shoes. I used a thin dowel rod to push the shoe string through the bag and tied the ends of the shoe string to picture hangers. The problem with that is it took several tries and at least five minutes to keep a roll of bags up. I also had to keep unwinding the string. Every time I took a bag off the roll, it rolled the string up.
Here you can see my pathetic string set up.
When I was getting ready to take the trash out one evening, I was trying to squish my sisters 2L bottle in the trash. Then a light bulb came on in my head and I grabbed the bottle and decided it was the perfect size to hold trash bags. I just had to wash it and cut the top off. It was pretty close to the right size. The roll of trash bags was a little bit big, but I could try cutting a slit in the bottle. I pulled out my scissors and cut the bottle. I had to put the lid on and stab it with a knife to get a hole started. I'm a little clumsy so I probably should have asked my husband to do this for me, but he was out and I was too excited to do this.
I cut a triangle down to the bottom of the bottle. Can you see it? The bottom of the triangle is all the way down to where the bump on the bottom of the bottle are.
Then I positioned the bottle the way I wanted it in the pantry. There was just enough room between the trash can and the shopping bag holder. Then I used my drill and drilled 2 holes through the slit, into the bottle against the wall. I put in plastic wall anchors for extra support in the dry wall. Ideally there would have been a stud right where I wanted to but the trash bag holder.
Here's the screws and anchors I used. I used the biggest ones in here.
This is what it looks like without the trash bags in there.
Look, the trash bag fits really nicely. Sure the bottle is a little small, but the edge of the roll rests on the triangle I cut out and I can easily pull a new bag.
I have had this in for about a month now and it is holding up really well. The bottle is holding up and it is staying on the wall. The best thing is that I didn't have to pay any thing for it!
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