I am sure we had a lot of those tips & tricks threads before, but they are:
a.) fun
b.) quite inclusive so all can take part
I go first:
I quite often cut PET plastic bottles (think: Coke) horizontally some 15cm from the top … et voilá …
instant free funnel…
I often do that, even as we actually do have funnels (which are always misplaced) … and I can tailor-make a funnel to my specific needs, e.g. a wide mouth bottle to funnel marmelade with chuncks of fruit that would clog a regular funnel.
When walking in from the parking lot in Walmart or the like, I grab an empty grocery cart from the corral and push it to the store. I’ve found that cars rushing through the lot will give a wider berth to a scratchy metal cart than to a soft squishy human. Bonus, if the chosen cart is annoyingly misaligned and doing a “My Friend Flicka” imitation, I’m aware of it from this test run and can trade it for a better one inside.
I’ve posted this before, but my dish drying rack is a vinyl-coated steel wire shelf (like the closet kind) mounted up above the sink between the 2 cabinets on either side of the sink. Saves on counter space and out of the way. I mounted a 2nd shelf higher up for jars of dried food storage, and because I can see between the wires, I don’t forget what’s up there.
Slightly different but just as effective: a one-liter bottle with the bottom cut off makes a deep funnel that’s less likely to splash if you’re filling something way down deep in the engine block. Our A/C unit has a fill port for bleach or vinegar but it’s way over there and has a pipe or two that makes it hard to pour. Beware all the liquid is out before you retract the funnel.
if you need to side-fill something (e.g. the gas tank in your car) but dont have one of those special funnels with accordeon spout, again, a pet bottle comes to the rescue:
Jam the mouth of the bottle into the tank-intake, make a mental note of what side-part of the bottle bottom you need to cut away, and then vertically fill the now diagonally sitting bottle.
If you wash the razor blades then dry them immediately ( use a hair dryer on low) they will last a long time. It isn’t the course hair that ruins blades-it is the rust.
once empty, cut them in half and you’d be surprised how much of the good stuff you can still spoon out (and that would go to waste, otherwise)
aahhh …
and those wooden kebab skewers, when feathersticking them, make for a great hair-retrieval-device to get long hair-“bunnies” out of your bathroom sink (father of 3 teenage girls ;-).
That reminds me of a mosquito-fighting trick I learned-- cut the funnel-shaped top off, fill the remaining container with a mix of yeast, warm water and sugar. then put the inverted top into the container. Place a few of those strategically around your yard. Mosquitoes will detect the carbon dioxide given off by the yeast, fly into the container, and won’t be able to find their way out.
I have a large yard, and tried this one Summer with about a dozen of the things throughout the yard. It seemed to work really well for awhile, but you have to regularly replace the yeast water, and I didn’t keep it up.
)