Any mom of boys will relate to the frustration of finding little “Hot Wheels” or dinky cars lying about absolutely everywhere. Pick any one of my handbags and I can guarantee you will find a car of some sort in it. I find them everywhere, in my car, my bed side drawer, my under wear cupboard. We have dozens of the, yet at the same time, because they are all scattered everywhere you can never find them !
Hot Wheelsยฎ vehicles have been an ongoing favorite of collectors, car enthusiasts and racing fans of all ages. The brand is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, remains the number one selling toy brand in the world with more than 5 billion Hot Wheelsยฎ cars produced and 2 cars sold every second! I can officially say I have contributed to a large share of that with my boys ๐
Typically I hold their toys and cars in your standard large plastic storage boxes from a Plastic Land but I absolutely hate digging to find the smaller cars in amongst the sea of other toys. I have been wanting to create a storage solution for their cars for a while. Naturally on google, there are endless storage solutions for these little matchbox sized cars. I loved some of the book shelf styled ones, where the cars are displayed up on the wall, but i wanted something slightly more interactive. I was particularly drawn to the one created by Frugal Fun for boys as it doubles up as a “play station” as well as a storage solution. It’s also darn easy to make.
You can make it out of three things:
Toilet paper rolls, mailing tubes or PVC piping as I did.
Initiallyย I started off collecting the toilet roll inners but along the way i decided i wanted something a little more sturdy. I headed off to my nearest Mica and got 3 metres of PVC piping cut up for me it about 10cm sections. It literally cost me all of about R50 !
Using an old crate that I already had, I positioned the pipe pieces into the crate. If your crate is to deep for your pipe pieces you could easily attach a backing board into it to ensure the pipes all come out level and the cars don’t fall out the back.
I washed and lightly smoothed out the pipes with a soft sand paper (there were a few rough edges) and glued the pipes into the crate. I then made a super quick sign out of cardboard and nailed it into the top of the crate.
The entire project took me less than 20 minutes, to add in a little extra storage, we all know I am always extra, i glued a magnetic strip down the side of the crate. I had read somewhere that some hot wheels (with the metal bottoms) could stick to magnets. This didn’t work however so i cut small strips of magnetic tape and glued that to the bottom of some of the cars so they could stick to the strip, to increase the storage space.
Et Voila ! A super easy storage solution of all of your Hot Wheels ! Do you see the magnetic strip down the side? I love that part ๐ Now i could really get fancy and spray paint it black and silver i guess, but lets me honest, “ain’t no body got time for that” ๐