Extra fridge magnets? Turn them into free magnetic shopping lists!

Do you have a few extra fridge magnets lying around the house?  Here's a fun way to upcycle them!

One of the fun things about living in Israel is having a magnetic front door.  Most front doors are metal, unlike back in Canada, where they were made of wood.  And because everyone's front doors are metal, it's very common for businesses to advertise by leaving information stuck to your door with a "fridge" magnet.

So far, we’ve been mostly throwing these out.  They're not powerful enough to hold up much, and I don't want them cluttering up our lives or getting us confused with the magnets we keep from the business we like and use (the guy who fixed our washing machine; the book store we like in Tel Aviv; the Chinese restaurant I went to in Beersheva).

But now I have an upcycling solution that's very quick and easy and kills two birds with one stone:  what to do with all those magnets, and what to do with clean white paper that's printed on one side. 

(AND which saves us from having to buy fridge-magnet notepads for shopping lists, which we used to do pretty regularly!)

Whenever I order online grocery delivery - about once a week, because it's soooo easy and doesn't cost much more than buying them in person - we get a bill that consists of three pages, quite a lot of paper in all considering that the actual groceries all fit on the first page.  The reverse side is completely unprinted, making it what my father used to call "good-one-side" paper.

So here's the quick hack:

1. Trifold your Shufersal Online bill, a boring report from work, an old school paper, or any other small stack of "good-one-side" paper.  Three pages is ideal, but 4 or 5 might work if your magnet was strong enough.
2. Cut off the outer edges of the two folds so you have 9 (or more) "shopping list" sized pieces of paper.  (Some of the pages will be backwards, so reverse these!)
3. Tap the stack of shopping lists so the edges are neat.  If one page is creased, roll the pages gently the other way to neaten them up.
4. Staple the fridge magnet to the top.

And ta-da!

The cheap fridge magnets can’t hold a ton of paper, but 9 shopping lists is a good start, and the magnet is totally reusable, so you can just do it again when you run out of paper.  One advantage of cheap magnets is that they’re super thin and easy to staple.

With more than one shopping list, you can use one for groceries and one for something else.  We like to hang a Shabbos food preparation list on the fridge sometime Friday morning, and I’ve started adding the weekly Shabbos in/out times so we have everything in one place.  So it’s handy having two fridge notepads so the two don’t get mixed up.

With a nice-looking paper (or a custom-printed message), this might make a good gift item for kids to make.  You’d want to test how many pages your magnet could comfortably hold and use as many as possible… and maybe also glue the magnet to the back sheet of paper so it didn’t flap around and reveal the advertising message.  Hmm… and while you were fancying it up, you could probably trim the magnet so it fit the size of the paper more neatly than I have here.

Enjoy your new shopping lists!

Tzivia / צִיבְיָה

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