Back in the '80s, NASA and the Associated Landscape Contractors of America did a study where they discovered which houseplants were the most effective in purifying the air in space facilities. Though you may not be living in a rocket ship, you can definitely benefit from having one or more of these plants in your home.
Like table salt, black pepper has its unexpectedly handy uses that goes beyond seasoning your meals at the dining table. You can use black pepper to keep ants from invading your home, drive away bugs from eating your delicious garden vegetables, temporarily fix a radiator leak, and even stop bleeding on a minor wound.
If you want to prevent your bathroom mirror from fogging up in the morning, simply rub shaving cream all over the surface before hopping into the shower.
If you ever run out of shaving cream in the morning, just step over from your bathroom to the kitchen and use olive oil as a substitute. Not only does it save you a future trip to the drug store, it also helps moisturize your skin.
Whether you use an iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android smartphone, it definitely doesn't deserve to get scratched up by car keys or other sharp objects that may be in your pocket or handbag. If you're too cheap to invest in a protective phone case, how about making your very own of duct tape and staplers?
If you can't stand the idea of tying a birthday present with a wrinkled piece of ribbon, all you need is a slightly warm light bulb that hasn't been lit for more than five minutes. Simply run the length of the wrinkled ribbon across the top of the warm light bulb until the wrinkles go away, saving you the time of finding your iron and ironing board.
If you missed out on the Chia Pet craze from the '80s and '90s, don't worry—it's never too late to build and make your own weirdly head-shaped thing with grass hair growing on top.
If you don't have enough shoes to justify an over-the-door shoe organizer, you can still buy them for your home because they can pretty much organize anything that is small and can fit in a pocket.
Commonly used for washing and scrubbing dirty dishes, the ubiquitous kitchen sponge can also be used to sprout seeds, loosen wallpaper, remove oil leaks, deodorize your fridge, and more.
The next time you're feeling tired and stressed out, pull down on your earlobes firmly for a few seconds, or apply firm pressure to the indentation on your nose bridge between your eyebrows using your thumb for several minutes while breathing deeply. Sometimes a little acupressure is all you need to give an extra lift to your mental and physical health.
If eating bacon for breakfast, lunch, and dinner isn't enough to satiate your love for rashers, then how about eating it for dessert too? It's what a true baconphiliac would do.
Using an empty Gatorade bottle, empty 5 oz. food container, power drill, string, and some red nail polish, you can easily construct your own DIY hummingbird feeder in less than 10 minutes to attract hummingbirds to your own backyard garden.
If your shoulders are starting to look like a white Christmas in the summertime, then you might have a chronic dandruff problem. Thankfully, there are numerous DIY home remedies at your disposal, which use cheap and common household products that are probably already in your kitchen or medicine cabinet.
If you don't have the backyard space to make a Japanese rock garden where you can spend long afternoons meditatively raking ripple-like patterns into the sand below your feet, settle for the next best thing by making a simple, miniature zen garden that can easily fit on the corner of your desk or nightstand.
Originally invented by the Shaker community in the 1700s, clothespins are incredibly useful for hanging wet clothing on a clothesline, but also can be used to organize your cable cords, keep your pair of socks together, hold down the used end of your toothpaste tube, and decrease the possibility of you accidentally hammering your finger while pounding down on a nail.
Is your favorite black T-shirt starting to look a little old? To restore a faded black fabric color to its former glory, add two cups of brewed coffee or black tea to your washer's rinse cycle.
Combine your passion for drinking soda and growing your own vegetables by making an upside-down tomato planter! This gardening project is especially great for people who have limited space for growing their own green things. To make this, you'll be using an empty soda bottle, aluminum foil, masking tape, twine, potting soil, and other simple materials.
A lukewarm can of soda placed in a refrigerator can take about 45 minutes to chill. On the other hand, a lukewarm can of soda placed in a bowl of ice, water, and table salt can take less than 5 minutes.
In 1859, 22-year-old chemist Robert A. Chesebrough accidentally discovered petroleum jelly when he visited a working oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Oil workers complained of a gooey substance referred to as "rod wax" which kept getting into the machinery and slowing them down. Chesebrough noticed that oil workers also smeared this same substance on their burn marks or dry skin to help speed the healing process.
You just ran out of shampoo, but need to give your hair a quick wash. Use baking soda! You can make an emergency shampoo paste from 1 part baking soda, 3 parts water, then work the paste into your hair, allow to sit for a few minutes, and rinse out with warm water.
Each year, about 40% of all food produced in the United States goes uneaten and gets thrown away. Become a part of the solution and not the problem by practicing the following simple hacks to make your produce and perishables from the supermarket last for as long as possible.
Cayenne peppers are great for spicing up your bland cooking, but did you know that they can also prevent frostbite? If you ever need to keep your feet warm during a long snow hike or skiing adventure, add a little bit of cayenne pepper powder to the bottom of your socks.
Ice cream never gets old in hot weather, especially if it's super cheap and made within the comforts of your own home!
Other than providing a convenient vessel for your carbonated beverages so that they don't go completely flat, aluminum soda cans are also quite useful for a number of other things once they're completely empty.
If you've got a couple empty coffee cans getting ready to go out to the recycling—don't get rid of them just yet. Instead, use them to make your own homemade ice cream. It's the perfect DIY treat as the weather gets warmer in anticipation of the summer season.
However much you love cooking fried fish for dinner, there's no need for your kitchen to smell fishy for days afterward. Keep your post-cooking funky kitchen smell to a minimum by boiling cloves in water, simmering lemon peels, oven roasting coffee beans, or leaving bowls of white vinegar on the kitchen counter overnight.
It'd be a financial burden to have to buy new shoes every time a current pair gets scuffed up, but thankfully there are some easy DIY tricks for saving us that trip to the shoe store. Scuff marks can easily be remove from shoes and sneakers using common household items found in your medicine cabinet or in your desk.
A scale factor is a number used as a multiplier in dilation. Dilation is the act of being enlarged or minimized. Say you have a dimension of 3''. The scale factor is 2:1. So, you multiply the dimension by the scale factor to get your new dimension. After you multiply those numbers, you get 6''. Here is a link that relates to this subject. Scale Factor.
After you've completely emptied out your coffee can of its coffee beans, put your caffeinated high to good use by getting crafty and productive with the empty vessel that now lies before you.
Originally invented by American mechanic Walter Hunt in 1849, the humble safety pin was first called a "dress pin." It was intended to solve the problem of bent pins and wounded fingers, but that's not all it's good for.
Cottons balls may not be the most exciting bathroom product in the world, but there are some surprisingly useful things you can do with them.
Where one sees plastic garbage bags, I see living creatures soaring high in the windy skies—and you can too. The choice is completely yours. But, wouldn't it be nice to spare one trash bag the indignity of holding waste?
Why is it that Mother's Day is the second biggest commercialized holiday when there are so many different DIY projects out there?
Sooner or later you're going to have to deal with a stuck zipper, whether it's on your favorite jacket, backpack, or pair of pants. Simply tugging hard on the zipper tab hardly ever works, but a few things lying around your house might do the trick.
Commonly associated with cleaning gunk out of your ears, cotton swabs, colloquially known under the brand name Q-tips, have a ton of other practical uses.
Add a little extra life to old books you'll probably never read again by transforming them into a sneaky secret book safe, an e-book reader case, a picture frame, or even a book planter for your indoor succulents.
They say that flowers are the way to a girl's heart, but why waste your money at the local florist when you can make your own? If you have a maple tree in the area, you can create a fanciful faux rose from maple leaves. If not, you can turn to the kitchen and make your loved one a bouquet of roses using heavy-duty plastic spoons.
Do you have an excess of wire clothes hangers from multiple trips to the dry cleaners? Rather than letting them take up space in your closet, you can use them for any number of things, from holding your necklaces and magazines to unclogging your sink and fishing dropped objects behind furniture.
What should you do with an orange peel after you're done eating the fruit part? If at least one half of the orange peel is still intact, consider using it as a seed starter pot, emergency oil lamp, bird feeder, or a super-easy, salt-packed DIY fridge deodorizer.
Bobby pins are great for pinning down flyaway bangs, but they're also great for pushing up the unused gel in a tube of toothpaste, marking the end of a transparent tape roll, opening the plastic seal in food jars, and even removing the pits from ripe cherries or olives.
