Dishwasher Clean/Dirty Magnet

I don’t know about any of you, but it drives me crazy when my family puts dirty dishes in the sink when the dishwasher is just a few inches away. The biggest issue is that nobody even checks to see if the dishwasher is clean or dirty. For years I have been saying I want to put a sign on the dishwasher that can be flipped to say “Clean” or “Dirty”. Now that my boys are old enough to start putting their own dishes in the dishwasher it seems more important to have a sign.

Since I have one child that does not read yet, I wanted to make sure it would be easy to know which side is which. To me blue means water and bubbles mean soap. For the dirty side I decided to use earthy colors. Funny enough I used a fall image and used the smudge tool. Because each side is very different even my little guy can tell the clean side from the dirty side.

My sign is fairly straight forward.

You will need:

Magnet sheets or those handy magnet ads that come with the phone books.

Your favorite editing program –You are welcome to use my graphics for your signs. Just right click and save.

Printer-I used plain paper

sticker maker or some other kind of adhesive

Contact paper

1. Create your own or resize my sign images to fit your magnet size. Mine are 4x4 inches since that is the size magnets I had.

2. Print and cut out the images on plain paper. The magnets are not very strong so you want the paper as thin as possible.

3. Run your images through your sticker maker. If you have a cartridge that does laminate on one side and adhesive on the other, use it to save you a step.

4. You need two magnet sheets. The magnet ads that came with my phone books are quite thin so I decided to use two to make sure it would stay where I put it. Put adhesive on one or both magnets on the ad side.

5. Stick the sign images on each side of the magnet sandwich.

6. Use contact paper to put a protective cover over your sign. Trim edges.

Now, when we run the dishwasher we flip the sign to the clean side. After we put the clean dishes away we flip it to the dirty side. Right away my boys noticed the new sign and wanted to know what it meant. I no longer have to remind my family that the dishwasher is dirty. At a glance they know to put their dirty dishes in the dishwasher. Hopefully the clean sign will encourage them to put the dishes away too. ;) It is such a simple thing and yet………

Katrina

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