Just before the ubiquitousness of LCD/LED TVs, my girlfriend (eventually Mrs. Cad) had an expensive large trinitron TV. It goes out and doing some research I found out it was one chip. $3 and 15 minutes of labor later, and avoiding the big red wire, her TV was up and going.
OK maybe that’s not the coolest part. My grandfather ran his own shop as a TV repairman and retired before people stopped repairing their TVs. So doing this fix-it really meant a lot to me in a way that’s hard to describe.
When I mow the lawn I keep a pocketful of plastic milk-bottle caps in my back pocket - all brightly colored. If I see a weed I want to come back to after I finish mowing, I drop it on that spot. Easy to find them afterwards, dig out the weed, and pick up the cap for next time.
Indeed, my washer has been like that for years. I think I even bought a new switch but just haven’t installed it.
I have globs Gorilla Glue on my pickups vinyl bench seat, has been holding together several small rips for many years now and keeping them from getting worse.
I use makeup that is in a hard plastic tube with a wand that has a tiny sponge on the end. That wand is not very flexible and at some point, it cannot reach the makeup that’s left in the tube. I use a plastic straw to get the rest out of the bottom of the tube (I cut it in half lengthwise). When that is gone, I pull the plastic top off the tube that keeps the sponge wand from having too much goop on it, then use the wand to get what is inside around the opening.
I also use Blistex Moisture Melt that comes in a tube, and when it’s low, I cut the end of the tube and scoop out what’s left and put it in a small cosmetic container I get from Target. Same with lotion in a tube.
There was a hole in the drywall in the laundry room where a repair to a leaking pipe was made, yeah, a cheap fix by the man and drywall is HARD to repair. So I lived with it. No one but me sees it. That is, until the scorpions found it. Every time I went in to do laundry, the fuckers scampered inside that hole. Enough. I plastered up the hole with glueboards
No more creepy scorpions. I was really proud of me. He looked and said “huh.”
Very recently I was mowing the lawn when the drive cable snapped. I clamped a pair of Vise Grips on the end of the cable and closed the grips over the mower’s push handle. It fit perfectly.
Mowed like that for 2 or 3 mowings before replacing the cable.
mmm
Several years ago, we needed to take a bunch of passport photos for me and the family. Now, if you go to Walgreens or CVS, they cost about $4 for two! I needed about 10 for each member of my family.
Went online and found a software for $10 that would accurately size a picture taken by a digital camera into multiple passport size photos on a single 4 X 6. I could them printed at the same Walgreens for 15 cents each. The software has paid for itself many many times over the past 10 years. And yes, it still works!
In some models of Dell computers at work, the fan in the back is held in place by plastic fasteners. The plastic degrades very quickly, so the fan falls out of place.
We just use zip ties to put them back into place.
At my wedding, we planned to have a champagne toast, but the venue (a coffee bar) didn’t have anything resembling the number of flutes we needed. We explored renting, or buying disposable plastic flutes and both seemed expensive for what we wanted, and the plastic flutes were cheap looking to boot.
The solution? We bought 100 champagne flutes at IKEA. They cost about $75 total, significantly less than either renting or plastic flutes, and the coffee bar offered to buy them off of us, or at least give us a few bucks off the bill at the end of the night.
My other cheap fix involved a car repair. It was a serious seeming malfunction in the climate control, the temperature knob stopped working and only blew out hot air. A console replacement (the recommended fix) would have cost well in excess of $600, but I found a repair online. 2 hours with a screwdriver soldering iron and short length of wire fixed it and it’s been perfect ever since.
Duck / Duct Tape, also known as “Minnesota Chrome.”
I have a full size portable dishwasher- the kind you roll up to and attach to the faucet at the kitchen sink. One day it quit working. I could hear a rattle in the door that wasn’t there before. I took the door apart and found that a plastic boss with a screw in it that held the off/on switch had broken. I replaced it with a stainless steel machine screw and a couple of stainless nuts with a bit of JB Weld as a threadlocker. That was at least ten years ago and it’s still working fine.
This isn’t really a fix, but an upgrade. I had a 2008 Toyota Yaris. Someone over at Yarisworld.com (a Yaris enthusiasts’ site) figured out that all Yarises had cruise control capability, but Toyota just left off the switches if cruise control wasn’t ordered. They published schematics- a trip to Radio Shack for a couple of momentary N.O. push button switches, a few resistors, and a reed switch, and I had “factory” cruise control for less than ten dollars.
Oooh! I’ve got two.
Cheapie Solution One: the hanging kitchen gadgets holder
Scene: lots of spatulas, tongs, and other implements of destruction. Anything with a hangy-hole.
Cut a dowel to size and paint with fun colored acrylic. Screw two large cup hooks into wall, and lay dowel across them. (Bonus: glue scrap wood or popsicle sticks to each dowel end as a brake.) Hang as many S-hooks as will fit, and hang whatever off each S-hook as needed.
Cheapie Solution Two: the toothbrush holder
Scene: Tiny bathroom, pedestal sink with no counter space.
I’ve done this for years. Joints (“pre-rolls”) at dispensaries are sold in airtight plastic tubes with a pop-up hinged lid.
Drill a few holes at the bottom for air circulation and water drainage, then nail the lid to the wall.
Voila! A holster for your toothbrush that requires zero counter space.
I have a tie rack in my kitchen that I use for this sort of thing.
My favorite cheap fixes are almost always to do with my outdoor spa. I picked up a full-sized, expensive, well-regarded brand of a spa off Craigslist for a song back in 2008 when the spa was about 3 years old. One of the best deals I ever managed to wangle. I paid about a third of what it would have cost new.
Over the years, the spa has needed various wear-and-tear repairs, including an auxiliary control panel and several jets. For giggles, I always have the local spa company give me a quote for their parts and labor to repair. Then I order the part online with a great aftermarket outfit, go on Youtube for a tutorial and do the labor myself.
Most recently the main control panel finally gave up the ghost. I was ordering a new cover at the local spa company a few days ago and asked if they would give me a bid to replace the control panel.
I’ll save close to $1,000 when I do it myself as soon as the parts arrive. Over the years, I’ve already saved around $3,000 in parts and labor as quoted by the local outfits. What a racket!
I did the same with my Kitchenaid mixer about 10 years ago when it stopped working properly. Opened that sucker up, dug the gears out their grease cave, ordered the parts and fixed it myself. The alternative was to haul it up to Portland and wait a month for the shop to perform an expensive repair. No, thanks. I must have done ok as it’s still kneading bread dough about once a week like a champ.
More than once I have backed my Jeep or my VW Baja into trees +/or rocks & break the tail light lens. It usually only breaks the lens and not the bulb. This is a problem as now both the tail lights and the brake lights are white. Cops do not like that.
My fix is to remove the bulbs and paint them with either red model paint, or red fingernail polish. When I first did this I just used my sisters nail polish as she was with me on that trip.
Now I carry some nail polish with me. I pick it up free or very cheap at yard sales. The model paint is already in my tool kit. I find it to be useful to enhance timing marks on almost anything, sewing machines to aircraft engines. The yellow paint works for broken turn signals.
I always get good used lenses cheaply. Eventually.
And you just gave me an idea. I have a north-facing window over my kitchen sink and a sidewalk view of the neighborhood. A lot of the neighbors wave at me as they walk by. I don’t want to use a shade, but would like something funky and decorative over the window. So, I could just use it as a way to store some of my many kitchen tools.
@carnut alternately, pots of hanging plants (such as pothos ivy, or even culinary stuff like thyme) are terrific ways to block nosy neighbor views without a full-on shade.
When we moved in, we got a huge (10’ wide) secondhand pine wardrobe taken apart, delivered, carried down the stairs, and put back together. The seller (a professional, not someone on ebay) came on his own and was really pissed off about having to put it all together despite us agreeing by text that that was part of the deal.
He left out the central strut supporting the rail you hang all your clothes on. Without it, the wardrobe was just a big place to throw clothes. My ex was pissed off and upset, and getting the wardrobe taken down and taken away would have cost about the same as we originally paid for it.
So I got a cheap plastic mop, pulled the head off so that the end with the niche in it where the head slots in was visible, and put it where the central strut should be. It fit perfectly, and has been holding up two people’s entire clothing supply for five years.
Plus then I also got to put all my clothes straight in the wardrobe because, when packing, I simply took all my clothes on hangers out of the original wardrobe, laid them on top of each other on the bed, lined up the hooks of the hangers, and put duct tape around the clothes at the top and the bottom. It made a big, easy to carry pile of clothes that didn’t need to be packed, unpacked, ironed, or anything.
Unpacking almost all my clothes was a matter of lifting up the duct tape pile, hanging them on the mop-supported rail, and taking off the tape.
In the garden, we have a side return. I literally cannot find a picture to explain what that is, because all the ones I can see are of ones that have been developed. It’s a bit of outside space that’s about six foot wide, and is usually next to an extra room in a Victorian era house. Hard to explain if you haven’t seen it, which everyone in England will have (not mine, but in general). It’s basically a bit of open space that’s six foot wide and maybe 15 foot long, gets little light, and is not very useful.
The previous tenant had put a small shed on one side of the side return. So I got a caravan washing rack, the kind you hang out of a window, hammered a couple of holes into the roof of the shed, put the spokes of the rack into it, sealed the holes with liquid rubber, and tada! A fair amount of space for hanging clothes to dry outdoors.
Apologies for possibly the most England-specific post ever, linguistically.
We also have a relatively useless bit of hallway near the back door, so I got a foldable rail installed there. It’s next to the washing machine cupboard (which was another hack; it’s in the airing cupboard - got a friend to hulk smash through the back of the cupboard to the bathroom next door and put in plumbing for a washing machine) so you just take the clothes out, put them on hangers, and put them on the rack. There’s a low radiator underneath it, so they dry quickly, and it’s easy to transfer clothes from the outside rack to the inside one a few feet away. Generally they don’t need ironing due to the way they were dried.
This might not seem all that astounding to some people, but it’s different if you live in very small spaces with lots of people and really don’t have space to air dry clothes. And if you’re the one doing all the laundry. We do have a combi washing machine/tumble dryer, but they’re much smaller than the ones in the US, so you always end up having to hang at least some things up.