Corralling pets takes creativity sometimes. This homemade safety gate creates enough of an obstacle that you can usually keep your little critters from the hazards of stairways and other forbidden areas in your home. Create a frame with 1″ PVC pipe and four corner joints. Cut two PVC pipes to the width you desire and two pieces to the height you’d like. Join them together, and sew a gate sized pocket to slide the frame into. Stitch up the forth side of the pocket (or sew in velcro or buttons), and you’ve got a safety gate to keep those four-legged friends from running amuck and getting hurt.
Make Scratches in Wood Disappear
It may sound a little nutty, but the oil in walnuts will hide scratches in wood furniture and in hardwood floors. Just grab any shelled walnut you have around the house to snack on or to bake with, and instead, gently rub it on the scratched area of wood. The oil blends with the color of the finished wood, and scratches in wood disappear like magic.
Light a Fire Anywhere
As we’ve started planning some of our outdoor adventures for the year, we’re gearing up our gear, too. For our outdoor fire place and for camping, we load up a mason jar with wooden matches. We close the jar with an air tight lid. We attach a piece of fine sand paper to the top of the lid so we can strike our matches right on the lid and light a fire anywhere. Remember that all matches are not created equally, so make sure to use “strike anywhere” matches for this hack!
Muffin Pan Plant Spacer
The possibilities for how to shape and space plants in the garden are endless. We think that you more orderly gardeners out there will love this idea, and creative ones will too. Just take the muffin pan from your kitchen out to your garden bed for a few minutes. Stamp it into the soil so the cups are imprinted into the soil. Place your seeds or seedlings into the indents and cover them with soil. The muffin pan plant spacer will create perfect columns and row. You’ll be enjoying your well spaced plants in no time.
A Cupboard Door Gone Chalkboard
We love having a chalkboard in our kitchen. With little wall space to spare, we painted the inside of a kitchen cupboard door with chalkboard paint. We keep our weekly menu calendar posted there to keep us on track. We’ve used it to jot down reminders for items that we’ve discovered we’ll need to buy the next time we’re out and about. We’ve also used it to leave our phone numbers for the babysitter. My favorite use so far is for spontaneous love notes and thank you notes we leave for each other. We just have fun with this hack, and we hope you will too!
Cupcake Liners Catch All
We were cleaning out the back of our car recently, and we discovered, for the zillionth time, a yucky sticky mess in one of the cup holders. The mess took far too much time to clean. Knowing there had to be a better way to spend our lives, I discovered this handy solution. Line the cup holders in your car with silicon cupcake liners. The liners will catch most of the junk. After they do, you can simply remove them, clean them in warm water and dish soap, and replace them. These handy little liners take the headache out of a potentially messy job.
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