Cardboard boxes are such a huge part of our lives.  It may sound like I am giving them too much credit, but I don’t think that I am.  If you were to take a walk around your house, you would probably discover so many more cardboard boxes than you thought you had, in a lot stranger places than you thought they would be.  And there are probably some en route with the postman, heading to your door as we speak.

My mother used to break down every single box she came across, and kept them in a ginormous stockpile under her stairs.  She had so many cardboard boxes we basically packed our whole house from them, ranging anywhere from a ring box to a washing machine box.

However, there are a lot of fun projects you can do with them, instead of wasting them or stockpiling them.  Below, I have listed three:

• Despite all of the obvious things you can do with cardboard boxes, one of my favorite remains painting with marbles. I first saw this done at a group home for people with special needs, and it really is a project for everyone.  Take the lid off a carton, or cut off the sides of a box so that there is only a couple inches up from the bottom, and squeeze different colors of paint randomly across the bottom.  Throw in a couple marbles and have the artist tip the box from side to side.  The marble will roll through the paint and make a fun design.
• Check this out: make a few notches at the top of a box, a few inches wide, and then set the box on the floor upside down, so that the notches become little doorways. Grab some golf balls and whatever you want to use as a golf club and you’ve got some putt-putt on your hands!
• And then, of course, you have your homemade dollhouse, where you glue a bunch of different sized boxes together to make rooms of different sizes, and you can decorate the walls with wrapping paper to look like wallpaper, and cut out pictures from magazines to use as the accessories and/or backdrop. If you don’t want to do something as girly as a dollhouse, why not put together a firehouse, or even some imaginary world of your own design?  The possibilities are literally endless.

Random Fact of the Day: Did you know that a flock of crows is called a murder?  It is speculated over why this is what they are called, and a lot of the speculation revolves around the superstition surrounding this particular species.  But an interesting observation pointed out that there was a time when groups of animals were given creative names, like a parliament of owls, a knot of frogs, and an ostentation of peacocks.

On a completely different note, when it is time to relocate, we all like to think that we want cheap moving boxes.  The problem with this is that we don’t actually take the time to stop and think about what it really means.  I mean, seriously, would you really choose cheap moving boxes to protect and transfer all of your worldly possessions?  All of your grandmother’s antique crystal serving bowls, or your entire collection of records by The Who, or even your books?  Imagine having the bottom fall out while holding any of the priceless items I just mentioned.  You would probably curse yourself for not going the extra mile.  Because what’s the point of even moving your stuff if you are just going to ruin it along the way, anyway?

A friend once asked for some help moving.  Imagine our absolute surprise and consternation when we arrived and discovered that she was only “mostly” packed.  Now, when most of us think of “packed” we think of items being placed in a container of some sort and being adequately secured.  Well, when this friend said “packed” she really meant that she had unplugged her lamps and set them by the door and was ready to give orders from there.  I kind of feel a little bad for her, actually, because I think she was hoping that it would wind up being some kind of party, and it was nothing of the sort.  She wound up having some pretty adequate help, but we were all people that wanted to get in and get the job done.  I think five of the six of us were prior military, and we were not impressed with either her strategy or her mindset.  I don’t care how cheap, I would have settled for some cheap moving boxes on that day.  It would have beat carrying grocery bags of cat supplies and armfuls of towels.

If there is a moral to the story of “cheap moving boxes” than it has to do with how it’s better to be packed than unpacked, and I think we can all agree on that.