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How To Organize Takeout Menus

Duuude, let’s go boarding. Clipboarding, that is. I’m not coordinated enough to tackle a surfboard, skateboard, or a snowboard, but this I can handle. And it can definitely be considered a Dude, Get On That Already project, because this old clipboard hails from the playroom, where I plopped it down among the ceramic animal chaos and said to myself: “I’ll do something cute with this later.” But soon I forgot all about it and fall turned into winter and now it’s late spring and completely time to get on it. It was a favor from a bridal shower I attended last fall (it was what we all used to play bride-quiz-games, and since the host nor the bride-to-be wanted to end up with fifteen clipboards they just told us to take ours home).

Clipboard

First I thought about covering it in a pretty paper and using it on the wall somehow (as a place to clip up new Clara art from week to week or notes that John and I write each other. But before doing anything hasty, I sidled up to John and asked him for his brain. And he came up with the best idea.

In our first house, we made an in-cabinet cork board where we pinned up shopping lists, recipes, articles about food we wanted to try, etc.

Cabinet Pin Board For Your

We loved it, but we didn’t want to do the same thing here (we have since made a binder full of favorite recipes safely tucked behind plastic sleeves and usually make our shopping list on our phone) but we did have a stack of takeout menus that were shoved into our utensil drawer (we had to lift the whole tray out to get them in and out, since they barely fit in there). Why not hang our little clipboard in our kitchen cabinet for holding our takeout menus – along with a pad for jotting down a few groceries we need if we don’t want to forget them and don’t have our phone nearby, perhaps if we have a toddler on our hip? Sold.

I started by covering it with some happy teal paper. I actually debated other more patterned options, but I figured whatever we clipped up there might be brightly colored or patterned or just plain busy looking, so I didn’t want the background to be too crazy. Don’t mind the odd shape of the paper, it was an old remnant from a previous project (originally from Michael’s for a buck or two).

Clipboard1

So I laid it under the clipboard and traced that shape onto the paper.

Clipboard2

I figured the top part should go around the metal part, so I sort of guessed how deep and wide that was and cut that notch out when I cut out the rest of the perimeter. Then I placed it on top of the clipboard to make sure it fit.

Clipboard3

Next it was glue time. I used Aileen’s Tacky Glue since I’ve had this same bottle on hand for at least five years. I channeled my first grade self and swirled it all around the board, and then used my finger to smear it (I didn’t want lumpy swirls of glue to show through the paper and look bumpy).

Clipboard4

Then I stuck the paper on top and weighed it down with some books. Can you tell Clara’s book basket was closer than all of our books in the dining room?

Clipboard5

After it was dry, I used our only upper cabinet in the kitchen (the one with our built-in microwave) and hung it at a nice easy-to-access height.

Clipboard10

We might hang something above it someday to balance things out (maybe a framed pic, just for a fun little behind-the-door surprise), but for now we love that our clipboard is completely hidden when the door is shut.

Clipboard11

As for how we hung it, we didn’t want to do anything permanent (making a hole in our freshly painted cabinets = heartburn) so we went the removable route…

Clipboard6

It’s hard to make out in this picture, but the clipboard had a metal tab that came out of the top of the board, and we had a clear 3M Command hook on hand, so I just mounted the clear hook to the cabinet with the temporary adhesive (it’ll come down without peeling any paint if I pull that curved white tab to the right of the metal part). Once the clear hook was up there firmly I just rested the metal clipboard tab over the hook. So I can lift the clipboard off the hook anytime I’d like and just put it back when I’m done.

Clipboard Hook Detail

Here’s a straight on shot for ya.  I’m sure what we have clipped up there will change, but for now, we have takeout menus and a sheet of shopping stuff that I wrote out because my phone wasn’t nearby.

Clipboard Done Hung1

And yes, that really says “eggs (12)” because I’m that crazy. Sometimes I forget if I wanted a half dozen or two dozen or what.

Clipboard8

So there it is. An old clipboard that I finally got on – for zero dollars. Hootie hoo. And now our utensil tray doesn’t have to hold our menus hostage anymore, so there’s a little more function (and I feel a little happier when I see ’em all hanging out together).

Clipboard9

What have you guys gotten on that’s well overdue? Any other clipboarding going on? I think it could be the next athletic endeavor for those too spastic to step on a skateboard, snowboard, or surfboard. You can even hang ten. And by that I mean you could hang ten menus.

Psst- Speaking of saying things like “hang ten” we hung out with our teenage niece and nephew this weekend and asked what the cool kid-catchphrases are these days (you know, like how we used to say “no diggety” and “word up”) and apparently the new things are “swagg” (it’s like having swagger, but shorter – and with an extra g) and “cool story bro, tell it again” (which you say sarcastically when someone says something lame). How hilarious is that? There’s a whole new vocabulary that us old people know nothing about. 

Comments

  1. Jess @ Little House. Big Heart. says

    Handy! I’d love to do something like that in our kitchen. Right now we just have everything stuck to the side of the fridge and it looks mucho cluttered.

    Our upper cabinets are all glass, but I’m sure there’s somewhere we could do this. Hmm.. you’ve got me thinking.

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      I wonder if a lower cabinet (maybe under the sink) would work? You can always remove the clipboard from the hook to look at things to avoid having to crouch down!

      xo,
      s

  2. Ann Sato says

    I have to learn another new language?! Can’t imagine what my 3 month old will be saying at 10 or 15 or 30! Yikes.

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      We just use the “Reminders” app that came with our iPhone. You can make multiple lists, so one is a to-do list, one is a shopping list, etc.

      xo,
      s

    • Jill C says

      we just got the “any list” app~ it is awesome because we make our costco/regular grocery lists as we meal plan (and it automatically separates into categories, which appeals to my OCDness), and then have the list(s) shared between me & my husband. that way, which ever one of us ends up at the store(s), the app will update on both of our phones what has been gotten.

  7. Jennah says

    I love that you are worried about balancing the look INSIDE YOUR CABINETS!

    Also, the inside of your cabinets makes me jealous. We have a small house, so I am trying to purge, purge, purge and keep less on hand. I am always, oddly, envious of how LITTLE you have!

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      Haha, I think it’s harder to purge than to never have something – I think we don’t know what we’re missing in the kitchen since we don’t have very many gadgets and cookware- haha. Good luck with everything!

      xo,
      s

  8. Crystal @ 29 Rue House says

    Love the idea and I have a empty clipboard lying around and menus shoved into the food cabinets that I could do this with! A few months back we started using the inside of one upper kitchen cabinets to hold a bunch of stickers/labels for daycare food. We use our blue painters tape to label every food item (name with breakfast, early snack, lunch or late snack on it) for our kids’ school meals. We reuse them and would just put them on the counter so there would be at least 10 labels hanging off the edge of the counter at any given time. We were just joking the other day how if we hadn’t moved the labels to inside the door, our whole counter would have been taken over since our baby now eats solids and gets the same food labeling for school as the first.

    Reply

  10. Lauren@FilingJointly says

    With me being the oldest of five kids and my brother being the youngest, there are A LOT of years in between us. He’s a freshman in college now and when I force him to talk to me on the phone I only really understand half of what he says.

    Someone needs to create a teenager/adult translation dictionary. Otherwise how am I ever supposed to know that “dirty” can mean awesome now?

    Reply

    • Ashley says

      Lol. I’m only 23 and I’m out of the loop. My high school students told me all kinds of new slang this spring. Saying something is “fire” means it’s really awesome. “Pause” is an interjection you use when you really don’t like something. They use swag too, but here in the Midwest, they only use one ‘g’. Lauren, you can always try urbandictionary.com for slang definitions. That’s what I use when I want to translate something a student says without asking them outright…just don’t browse too much, it can get a little raunchy.

  11. Leah says

    great post, I don’t know if I missed this in a previous post but what is next to your cereal jars? It looks something like a cake stand.

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      It’s a glass container that’s nested, so you can lift out the top or middle to get things like biscotti or tea (which we just toss in there so it looks fancy and saves room in the pantry- hah).

      xo,
      s

  12. Lauren says

    Hmmm… is it possible that I just read your boarding update via your facebook page, but cannot see it on the main younghouselove.com page? (the most recent story there is the rug update). This could just be my tech un-savvyness…

    LOVE your blog!!! Thank you for sharing your home adventures with us all!

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      Sometimes it can take your computer a little while to cache, so if you clear your cookies/cache/data it should pop up. Otherwise it should come up within 15 minutes or so anyway.

      xo,
      s

  13. Natalie says

    We were received a lot of frames as wedding gifts (in September) and we finally got around to selecting (which was, I think, the hardest part), printing, and then cropping photos from our big day to fit the frames. It’s nice to finally see photos of us, instead of the sexy models that came standard in the frames haha!

    Reply

    • Jess @ Crunchy Hot Mama says

      I was about to ask that, too. Thanks for sharing…the stationary is adorbs ;)

      My hubby and I will say that to one another if we start telling a story, then either forget what we were saying or forget the point of it (that’s usually me). The other will say, ‘That was a great story, will you tell it again?’

  17. Mandy says

    I noticed you have your microwave tucked away in the cabinet. I wanted to do this with my recent kitchen reno, but my husband said we can’t b/c we’d need to ventilate it somehow. Is he correct, or was he lying to me to save some work?

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      Oh yes, we ventilated that sucker like crazy! Check out the link to that post (when we mentioned that microwave cabinet here, we linked to it).

      xo,
      s

    • YoungHouseLove says

      Alas, we upgraded to two iPhones a little while back because we were struggling to stay on top of comments (this way we can both answer/approve when we’re in the car waiting for someone/something and can text each other photos to see if something I see in the store is cool with John before I buy it- or vice versa).

      xo,
      s

  20. alex says

    Haha. I love the cool story bro comeback. So funny. Also, for hours if hilarity…just go to knowyourmeme.com…itll catch you up…the Willy Wonka sarcasm meme is my fave

    Reply

  21. LauraC says

    I think my favorite part is the picture of the worn board books; it makes me feel better. We try to take good care of all our books (former librarian here) but after child #2, our most loved books are not looking so hot. Jonathan got on a tear-off-the-spines kick a while ago, so while they were repairable and still readable, they don’t look very good. (Yeah, books got banned from him for a month or two so he could forget about that fun habit. Hopefully it’s gone for good.)

    Reply

    • Cordia says

      Is it wierd that I thought the same thing? Haha! My boys have torn some books up. I have quite a few like that too. I used clear packing tape to tape board books back together b/c I hated to throw them away b/c the “pages” were still perfectly fine, just torn from the book itself. They’re stil going strong. Might as well get as many years out of them that I can!

  25. Amy says

    My brother still doesn’t accept the word “sketchy” as a word. I used it in somewhat scary situations, ie. “That dude in the grocery store was sketchy”. It’s totally a word!
    I’m 26 and my dad still says, “are you going to get jiggy with it?”
    *eye roll*

    Reply

  26. Katie says

    My friends and I used to say “great story, tell it again” when something was lame or pointless… maybe we were ahead of the times? (since that was 15 years ago…)

    Reply

  27. Erika says

    An eleven year old girl said to me last week “Cool story bro, you should tell it at parties!” I had no idea what she meant and I’m 21 for pete’s sake!

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      It can come off without removing the paint from the cabinet since it’s 3M! So if we ever want to use it somewhere else, we can (we don’t have plans to move it at this point though).

      xo,
      s

  32. Lauren says

    My sister has an imaginary story basket that she puts lame stories in. She’ll make a round shape with her arms out in front of her. She’ll then prompt the bad story teller by saying “C’mon, put it in”. You’re supposed to then act like you are putting the story into her basket. If you ask her what she’s talking about, she’ll tell you it’s the good story basket. It is really funny to watch people who are unfamiliar with this try to figure it out.

    Reply

  34. Larissa says

    Cute clipboard!

    We have that Yummy Yucky book and every time he reads it my Hispanic, hot-sauce lovin’ husband makes an inappropriate (and hilarious) comment about the writer thinking hot sauce is yucky in his Daddy-reading voice. It’s one of those things about being a parent that I love – those little inside jokes that make reading the same books, singing the same songs, playing the same games over and over again more bearable. Just seeing the cover of that book brought a smile to my face.

    Reply

  35. Allyn says

    At least you didn’t put something like eggs (7). Then you would be crazy.
    I’m obsessed with making grocery lists on my phone. I love tapping things and seeing them get crossed out, then when everything has been checked, the whole list gets crossed and I feel like I won a major prize. Yeah, dork.

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      Haha- this is true. I wonder what would happen if I asked the cashier to just ring up seven of them for me and take the other five back?

      xo,
      s

    • Allyn says

      Hahaha. It’d be like that moment in Father of the Bride when Steve Martin dismantles the hot dog buns so he doesn’t pay for what he doesn’t want. It didn’t work out too well for him .

  36. Alissa says

    Love this idea! I also noticed in the picture you didn’t paint the inside of your cabinets. My boyfriend and I are about to paint ours and we’ve gone back and forth about painting the insides…What made you decide not to?

    Thanks!

    alissa

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      We like that the inside of the cabinets is natural wood since it can take a beating and won’t crack or peel. Our brand new Kraftmaid cabinet drawers in our first house were wood interior (it’s just how they came) and we actually liked the two tone look, so we embraced it!

      xo,
      s

  39. Hannah says

    I teach juniors in high school, and I’m only 6 years older than most of my students (though they don’t know that, shhh!). Swagg is a common one now. But probably the one that got on my nerves about 2 years ago was “green.” Everything was “green.” Like, if you were getting onto a kid for dress code, they’d say “Mrs., that’s green!” Got old really quick. It’s amazing the new slang words they come up with – seems like there’s something new every week

    Reply

  40. Demi says

    Great idea! I actually dreamed about you two last night. There was a new post on the blog about the change you had made to the frame wall. It wasn’t obvious at first but as you scrolled down the pictures were taken from a closer point of view and it came clear what the change was. One of the frames held a picture of John, Sherry, Clara and Burger and there was a baby photoshopped into your arms. (Really quite badly too..) and that was the way you announced that you were 23 weeks pregnant!

    Weird, right? No idea why I dreamed this (and how random is 23 weeks along?)Hahahaha. Thought I’d share it with you guys! xo

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      Oh my gosh- that’s hilarious! Kind of a great way to announce actually. You’re a dream genius! I’m actually not prego though (we’re not trying yet) but you’d be amazed how many people I hear from who say “I dreamed you were prego- are you?!” – haha. Maybe it’s Katie Bower’s pregnancy that somehow overlaps with me in people’s minds since we’re blog buddies?

      xo,
      s

  41. Gwenalyn says

    I’ve always said the “cool story, tell it again” line! Guess I was born in the wrong generation. Sad face! Love the clipboard idea! I might have to give it a try. Maybe I’ll use it to hold chore charts though… hmm…

    Reply

  42. Kellie Guske says

    Sooo, this is the first time on this site, and im obsessed…going through my work storage closet and grabbing some clipboards! Thanks for the great site. cant wait to see what else you got!

    Reply

  44. emilymarion says

    I’ve noticed the lingo lately gets abbreviated.
    Adorbs=adorable
    Presh=precious
    Toates=totally
    Redunk=ridiculous

    I’m only 30 & I find myself saying “Huh?”

    Reply

  45. Pamela @ Pink Hammers & Sippy Cups says

    I LOVE how you guys have your microwave in your cabinets! Right now we have a microwave range thingie which really, really sucks and we want to swap it out for an actual range hood but we have no clue where we’d put the microwave then! Is your microwave just that small or is it a wider than usual cabinet?

    Reply

    • YoungHouseLove says

      It’s the smallest microwave we could find in a secondhand cabinet that would fit it (there’s a link in this post to the original post about how we added ventilation, etc). Hope it helps!

      xo,
      s

    • EngineerMom says

      We have our microwave on top of our fridge. We’re both fairly tall, so it works, if that’s something you could handle!

  46. Hannah says

    I love the picture of Clara’s books. We love Leslie Patricelli books in our house too! My almost 2 year old’s favorite is the Potty book and she even insists on taking it to the grocery store with us.

    Reply

  50. Michelle N says

    Love it! This is one of those projects that I say…Duh why didn’t I think of that, haha! Thanks for the idea!

    Reply

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