Six Brilliant Ways to Reuse Your Empty Cardboard Boxes

If you have any empty cardboard boxes lying around your house, you can recycle them. Furthermore, after reading these ideas for reusing your empty cardboard boxes, you’ll be surprised how useful they can be and you’re sure to come up with a lot more ideas on your own.

Some of them are cute, others are practical, and others are great to do with the family. There’s nothing better than giving things a second life, and that’s why we’ll show you some examples of how to do it.

This is how you can reuse your empty cardboard boxes

A surprise gift

It’s not surprising to look at a box and think of a gift. Instead of buying special packaging for this purpose, you can surprise a good friend with a box entirely decorated by hand.

It’ll depend on your crafting skills, however, you can bake some cookies, make a nice scarf, or include a photograph, you decide. Then, put it inside one of the cardboard boxes you have around the house and decorate it.

Paint it, wrap it in colored paper or cloth, as the Japanese do. In addition, this technique has become famous by the hand of Marie Kondo and is called 風呂敷 (furoshiki). You’ll see that it’s simpler than you imagine and much more sustainable. In this video she explains how to do it.

Reusing your empty cardboard boxes to make an extra-large board game

Have you ever played Jenga? It’s that game where you pile up wooden blocks and try to get them out one by one without the tower falling down. Furthermore, it’s super fun and if you play with your little ones, you can work on their motor skills.

So, imagine how cool it can be to do it in a large format. How, you ask? Well, with different sized boxes making a human sized tower. You can spend an entire afternoon painting and decorating them as you like and, once they’re dry, it’ll be time to test your whole family’s skills.

Some DIY decor

Another great idea to reuse your empty cardboard boxes and, at the same time, beautify your home, is to create a decorative sign to put on one of the walls.

Inspirational words or messages became fashionable some time ago and are a very original and personal way to highlight your walls.

Use the boxes to shape each letter, then paint them to match your color palette, decorate them and hang them directly on the wall or on a string or thread.

A memory box

We’re sure you keep a lot of objects to remember important moments in your life. Instead of having them scattered all over the house, why don’t you make a special box to keep them tidy and intact?

You can make as many as you have memories. That’s to say, one for those letters written to you when you were a teenager, another one for your school achievements, one more for the objects you keep from your childhood… Furthermore, you can decorate each one with the theme you keep inside and put them together on a shelf.

Reuse your empty cardboard boxes to organize your drawers

If you have several boxes of different sizes, create dividers to keep your drawers super tidy. You can use shoe, cookie, and candy boxes. To do this, stick them together until they fit inside your drawer.

You’ll have several compartments so the different objects won’t get mixed up with each other. However, the key is in the decoration you choose and the decoration you give them to make them look beautiful. You can use paint, paper, fabric, or any material you have at home.

A birdhouse

Have you seen those beautiful wooden birdhouses in gardens? If you have a terrace, you can put one up attached to a tree or a branch. You know what? It can even be made of cardboard. It’ll be less resistant, but you can replace it when it wears out.

Reusing your cardboard boxes can give you a lot of satisfaction and you’ll have a lot of fun. And you’re also taking care of the environment.

Most of the objects you have at home can have a second life if you use your creativity. Can you think of some more uses for all those boxes?