Water Bottle Organization LifeHack

Is there a mom alive who doesn’t simultaneously love and despise reusable water bottles? Water bottles have saved me from the horror that is watching my children try to drink from public drinking fountains without contracting the plague more times than I can count. I love them so much that each person in my family has at least two to their name: one for using plus one in the wash. Even I have a couple of them: one for home and one for barre and Pilates classes at the studio. But OH MY WORD, the clutter.

They have fallen on my head after rolling off of the top of the refrigerator (bad place to try to keep them, FYI). More than one has clanked and slammed down the stairs to its untimely squished death after a storage basket upended because kids were wrestling near it. I shoved them all over my kitchen counter waiting for the insides to become bone dry after a trip through the dishwasher because I have a serious fixation with not putting a lid on a wet bottle. No more wire hangers? No. I’m fine with wire hangers. No more wet water bottles with lids in place so they can fester and grow bacteria ever! And I’m not going to even TRY to count how many water bottles have been retired because their extra proprietary, funky shaped lid went missing in our black hole of a kitchen catch-all drawer.

I tried everything I could think of to organize them: wine racks, shoe holders, laundry baskets, and even -out of sheer desperation- plastic grocery bags hanging on hooks inside the basement stairs. Every one of them failed because of one major flaw: nothing had a place where we could store the odd lids and still actually see them. Every one, that is, until I found this Michael Graves Design Over-the-Door Basket Organizer from JCPenney. There are two main differences between this bad boy and an over-the-door shoe organizer.

• The nifty mesh pocket at the top lets you drop in the un-matched lids or tops or straws for the water bottles and still keep a visual on them. No black hole happening there.
• The baskets (or shelves) hold everything from small 1-cup water bottles to the largest canteens (in the top basket) and everything in between. They even hold our 1-liter Sodastream bottles neatly.

To say that I’m a fan of this basket organizer is to put it mildly. I recommend it to all my mommy-friends who have been overrun with water bottles.

MAJOR BONUS: The kids can find their own water bottles and lids for all their summer excursions into the great wild that is our backyard or the playground or picnics or bike-riding with friends, or…or…or… You get the idea. Summer just got a little easier.

Giveaway

The good folks at JCPenney have kindly offered a $100 JCPenney gift card to one lucky Foodie with Family reader. You can use it to grab a water bottle organizer, er, Over-the-Door Basket Organizer and still have enough left over to grab some supplies to make your summer fun! How do you enter? It’s simple! Tell us your favourite #lifehack in the comments below: what tricks do you have that make your life a little easier?

Sweepstakes Rules:

No duplicate comments.

You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:

1. Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post
2. Tweet (public message) about this promotion; including exactly the following unique term in your tweet message: “#SweepstakesEntry”; and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post
3. Blog about this promotion, including a disclosure that you are receiving a sweepstakes entry in exchange for writing the blog post, and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post
4. For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about an alternate form of entry.

This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older. Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. The notification email will come directly from BlogHer via the sweeps@blogher email address. You will have 72 hours to respond; otherwise a new winner will be selected.

The Official Rules are available here.

This sweepstakes runs from 5/19-6/13/2014.

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