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.