If you’re a regular reader of my Easy Upcycling column, you might remember that my children eat an inordinate amount of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. This results in our household consuming about four loaves of bread a week. After a few weeks of throwing those little plastic bread tags in the recycle bin, I thought, “There’s got to be something useful I can do with these.”
So, I started putting them aside until I could figure out what that something was.
A few weeks later, while I was on all fours behind our home entertainment center trying to plug all the various cables into a new Belkin Surge Protector (thunderstorms are a regular occurrence in coastal South Carolina), inspiration struck. Those little bread tags would be perfect as cord labels, showing me which cord goes to which device; that’s a lifesaver when trying to figure out why the Frozen DVD won’t play.
Bread tags aren’t inherently attractive, however, and even though these would be tucked away somewhat out of sight, I decided to see what I could do to spruce them up. I found some leftover paint from our living room remodel and painted each tag the color of the living room wall. Then I labeled them to correspond to the different devices and made matching tags for the gadgets that have HDMI ports.
Then, I simply I attached them to the correct cords on the surge protector and to the correct HDMI ports on the television (using my 6-year-old as my spotter to tell me which device turned off when I unplugged which cord)—super easy and super useful for a gadget-obsessed household such as ours.
I painted all the tags I had, about 30 in total (as I said, a lot of PB&J), so they’re ready at a moment’s notice to be upcycled into handy cord tags for any gadget around the house.
Jennifer Tuohy is a tech savvy, eco-friendly writer for The Home Depot, with expertise in DIY upcycling projects that re-use everyday items that we would usually throw away. For more cord management products and ideas, visit The Home Depot.