Somewhere between my first post-college apartment and now, I’ve accumulated what feels like 986 different drinking vessels for our family of two (humans). People give us glasses, we misplace them during a move, buy more, then find the old ones, and then there’s the time I thought buying a 24-pack of mason jars to serve as more drinking glasses was a good idea.
TL;DR: We’re short on cabinet space and long on mason jars.
What we do need though, is more soap and lotion dispensers. Now that we have more than two sinks and three rooms, it’s convenient to have several of these guys lying around for whenever we need to wash potential pandemic off our hands or moisturize them against the upcoming dry winter air.
In the easiest DIY ever, I ended up repurposing the absurd amount of mason jars we had into dispensers. There are even levels of how easy you can make it depending on whether you want to paint the jar or leave it crystal clear.
You start with these two basic items:
You can get standard mason jar dispensers here from Amazon ($12.59 for a two-pack). If you don’t have 20 spare mason jars lying around because you’re not insane, Amazon’s got you covered here ($21.40 for a four-pack) as well. I should note that I prefer the Ball mason jars because I like the aesthetics of the raised lettering (especially if you want to up the ante by painting it). If you don’t care for this, there is a 5-pack on Amazon for $22.99 that’s free of any wording here.
I decided to repurpose two mason jars because we needed a new dish soap dispenser in the kitchen and a lotion dispenser in our office. I kept it simple with the dish soap since it’ll be getting wet a lot and even though chalk paint with a wax finish is pretty durable, I didn’t want to keep exposing the paint to water.
Then, I screwed the dispenser onto the mason jar, tied a bow on it, and poured my dish soap in. It’s that easy.
For the lotion dispenser, I painted it with two coats of Rustoleum Linen White Chalk Paint and sanded down the lettering for a weathered look once it was fully dry (three hours in between coats). Then, for an added layer of protection, I rubbed on some Behr Interior Chalk Decorative Wax.
Sometimes it’s fun spending an hour delicately hot gluing twine around a light bulb and other times, I just want to twist a cap onto a mason jar and feel like I’ve accomplished something. This is for those latter times.
“If you look for happiness in simple things, it becomes very difficult to become unhappy because access to simple things is very simple and easy.” – Mehmet Murat ildan
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