IKEA's Laundry Bag Makes For A Surprisingly Perfect DIY Camp Sink

When it comes to cooking while camping, it's quite the experience. Learning to cook on an open fire and trying all sorts of outdoor tricks, like cooking some delicious potatoes that make the perfect side dish for your campsite dinner, is a lot of fun. However, if you're someone who wants to spend less time cooking around the campfire, there's a genius hack for this problem as well. 

Whether or not you like cooking while camping, cleaning up after is an annoying part of the process. Doing dishes at home is already a little annoying and time-consuming, even with proper tools, running water, and a dishwasher. If you take away all of those conveniences, doing dishes is somewhat complicated. When camping for a day or two, rustic dishwashing is tolerable. But for the long-term, it's frustrating trying to balance your fresh water usage and keeping everything clean. Having a proper sink would be nice, but it isn't very feasible.

Thanks to a fun Ikea hack shared by Jules Yap on Ikea Hackers, having a nicer place to wash dishes might not be so far-fetched after all. The product they used to make a nice sink? A standing laundry bag. It's the perfect option for a homemade sink, with just a little bit of adjusting. 

If you're looking to make a simple outdoor sink to upgrade from a plastic bin balanced on the ground or a rock, then you don't need much at all. The JÄLL from Ikea is meant to be a laundry basket, but it also works as a kitchen sink with the right adjustments. It may sound strange to use an Ikea laundry basket as a sink, but it works well, and it's only one of several Ikea essentials to make camping in the great outdoors easy.

However, you can't just open it up and start using it to wash. While the material itself is waterproof enough to hold in water, the seams aren't. While a little bit of water leaking isn't a big deal, it can make a mess and lead to a waste of fresh water if you aren't careful. Some sort of sealer made specifically for seams, like a tent seam sealer, will help keep your sink holding water for much longer.

The depth of the bag will also have to be adjusted, as a 13-gallon bag is a little too large. If you're handy with sewing, cutting the bag to the length you want and then sewing it back together and sealing the seams is an effective option.  That's all you'll need for the simple version. However, if you want it to be a lot more efficient, like Yap's version, you'll have to take a few extra steps.

While the laundry bag makes a nice kitchen sink that's at a good height and is collapsible, you can definitely do more with it if you're handy. With the right products, you can make a pump, a drain, and even a place to store clean and dirty water. This makes for a rather nice sink, much closer to one you'd find in a traditional home. However, it's not always ideal for those moving around a lot, as all of these additions make for some cumbersome stuff to carry on your camping trip.

If you do want an upgrade, you can add parts such as a drain, two containers to hold water, flexible water pipes, a faucet, a place to store or set your sponge and soap, and a pump. Foot pumps are some of the best options, as they're easy to handle even when your hands are full, and it's easier to control exactly when the water turns on and off to save you water, all without using power. They're also fairly easy to set up, as you just need a hose from your clean water source to the pump, and then a hose from the pump to your faucet.  

The two containers are for your gray and fresh water. One jug is connected to the pump and the faucet. Meanwhile, the other connects directly to the drain to hold all of the dirty water.