Easy and Cheap DIY Car Organizer

This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #GIVEEXTRAGETEXTRA #CVS #CollectiveBias

Gum in my purse

There are two things I don’t like about keeping packs of gum in my purse: One, I can never find it. Two, the package gets beat up and I end up with sticks of gum all over the bottom of my purse. Nothing worse than a half-wrapped piece of gum rolling around with the stray coins and dirt on the bottom of my purse – yum!

Sharing my gum

I’m one of those people that offer gum to friends and family but secretly hopes they say no. It isn’t as bad now that I work from home, but when I worked at an office, I would have a stick of gum after lunch every day. It never failed, I’d get in the car with my coworkers and try to secretly take out the pack of gum and someone would notice. I’d begrudgingly offer a stick to everyone in the car because I knew it was polite; however, I was mentally thinking don’t take all of my gum!

Give Extra, Get Extra

When I was at CVS the other day, I went to pay and looked over the candy and gum at the checkout lane – in case anything was on sale that I could stock up on. I noticed a different package of Extra® Gum. In bright yellow, it said 35 sticks – over 2 packs! I scooped up a couple packs to bring home. One was Extra® Gum Spearmint and the other was Extra® Gum Polar Ice®.

With 35 sticks of gum, I might actually feel okay offering gum to friends and family. I won’t need to shoot daggers with my eyes in hopes that they say they don’t want a stick. I might actually seem friendlier!

When I took the wrapper off of the package, I realized that the new Extra® 35-stick pack is also made from durable, recycled packaging. I can keep it in my purse and not have the package fall apart as I dig around looking for my keys!

DIY car organizer

Now you may be wondering what all of this has to do with an easy DIY car organizer. Well, now that I have found the 35-stick pack of Extra® Gum, I not only keep a pack in my purse, but I have started keeping one in the car. I’m enjoying being able to offer gum to passengers while we drive to our destination and not feeling the fear of an empty pack.

I started thinking about different things that I share with passengers in the car and thought it would be a neat idea to create a little container to hold these items. That way they could be accessed easily and passed around the car as needed.

How to make an easy and cheap car organizer

Supplies needed:

• 3-ring binder pencil pouch (I purchased one with that had a plastic window in it so I could easily see the items in the pouch.)
• 2 loose binder rings (I purchased a package of assorted sizes so that I could find the right size… it will vary depending on your car)

Directions:

Step 1: Put one binder ring through the left hole of the pouch.

Step 2: Put the other binder ring through the right hole of the pouch

Step 3: Fill the pouch with car supplies. I put in the following items that I commonly hand to car passengers:

• Extra® Gum Polar Ice®
• Package of tissues
• A small container of bandages
• Small notepad
• Pen
• Spray hand sanitizer

Placing the organizer in your car

Now you can put the organizer in your car. There are different ways you can do this:

• For access from the front seat, you can attach it to the visor or place it in the glove compartment. If you choose the glove compartment, you could purchase multiple pouches to store other items (registration, car manuals, etc.) and place them all on one ring.
• For access from the back seat, you can attach it to the headrest of one of the front seats.

For visor placement: On the passenger side of the car, clip the left ring around the left side of the visor and the right ring on the right side. Note: If the organizer is longer than your visor (like mine), I wouldn’t recommend placing it on the driver’s side as it will obstruct part of your view.

For back seat placement: Clip the rings to the headrest on each side. Or, you could only use one ring and let it hang down for easier access from the front seat as well.

To remove the items, just hold the organizer horizontal, unzip, and take out what you want!

Now you are all set to easily share items in your car… even Extra® Gum!

Get more ideas for sharing your Extra® Gum with friends by following the hashtag #GIVEEXTRAGETEXTRA.

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Will you be picking up the new Extra® 35-stick packs at CVS? How would you share them?