One thing that drives me nuts in my car is a drink that spills in the cup holder, making a mess. Not a big mess; just drip down the side and make your cup holder sticky enough that when you throw change in it later and have forgotten about the mess, the coins are all yucky as well.

Recently, as I was cleaning out the car, I kept thinking that I needed to figure out a way to stop that from happening or at least cut down on the mess. I thought about those padded shelf liners you can pick up pretty cheap ( I still have a roll somewhere), but I thought it might be difficult to peel up to clean and not really cut down on the stickiness factor.

Yesterday I came across a stone car coaster, even though it says it fits most vehicles I didn’t want to buy it for the approximate 3.00 that it cost and my cup holders are a D shape and not round, so it may not be a good fit. There has to be something better and cheaper.

cupholderspnge.jpgThe answer: a sponge. I had a pack of sponges I had bought at a dollar store that came in varying thicknesses (unfortunately, all pink). I don’t have a deep cup holder, so a thick one was out of the question. Since I not very good at cutting down the side of a sponge to make it thinner, I found an existing thin one, about the same thickness as the car coaster.

I traced the cup holder on a piece of paper and cut out the paper to get the best estimate for size. I decided to go a little smaller than the cup holder as I found that getting the sponge out took some doing since I don’t have fingernails. I set a cup in to check stability and viola; I have a chance at a less messy cup holder. Plus I can just snatch the sponge out and rinse with water/soap to clean and put it back in.

One thing I have to note that the sponges do get hard after enough rinsing, either I will just cut a new one or wet the sponge while my drink is in the holder. I guess I’ll see how this test goes, if it doesn’t work, I’ll pay out the money for the car coaster and have only lost a couple of sponges in the process.