MacGyverisms How-Tos

How To: Turn an Ordinary 9-Volt Battery into a Secret Safe

Sometimes the best way to hide things is in plain sight. Whether you're trying to sneak some medication past security at a concert with a zero-tolerance policy, or you're just worried that maybe Omar comin', YouTuber MrGear has a clever way to put your mind at ease.

How To: If You've Run Out of Shaving Cream, Give These 10 Household Items a Try

Running out of any shower necessity is just a temporary annoyance, but it always seems worse when it's an empty can of shaving cream or gel. Sure, you could dry shave or use whatever liquid toiletry item is in hands reach, but if you want a truly smooth shave without irritation, you'll want to try one of the following alternatives. Some of them might even work better than your can of Barbasol or Skintimate.

How To: Charge a Cell Phone on Train Tracks

If you're ever lost or hurt out in the middle of nowhere with a dead cell phone, you might be able to "flag" down help as long as you're near some railroad tracks.

How To: 8 Easy Ways to Remove Cigarette Smoke Smells from Your Car

The lingering smell of cigarette smoke can bother just about anyone, including smokers themselves. Unfortunately, it can be quite difficult to mask or completely get rid of the smell altogether. While you can go through extremes like washing and even repainting the walls in your home, those options don't exist when the odor is in your car.

How To: The Trick to Keeping Your Home Warm During Winter for Cheap

When temperatures drop and hit new lows during the cold, winter months, it's hard not to crank the heat up. That means increased energy bills each month, no matter if you rely on gas, electric, or another fuel for heating.

Winter Hack: How to Turn a Dead Battery into a Hand Warmer

My least favorite aspect of the winter season is how my fingers always turn into stiff, numb digits, unfeeling and seemingly incapable of making even the slightest movement. Yes, that might sound overdramatic, but if you hate wearing gloves like I do, you probably know exactly what I mean.

How To: Remove Water Rings on Wood Furniture with Toothpaste

Most wood furniture is long-lasting, durable, and resistant to great wear and tear over the years. However, set a single sweaty, wet cup or bottle on the surface of your favorite wood dining table, or your prominently placed wooden coffee table, and you'll end up with a round water ring stain that is difficult to get rid of.

How To: 5 Winter Life Hacks to Keep You Warm, Dry, & Moving

Winter is already here, and when Jack Frost is nipping at your nose, he tends to nip on your wallet, too.

How To: 7 Ways to Make Your Own Cold Packs at Home

Having a store-bought cold pack on the ready is the perfect solution for minor bumps, bruises, sprains, and strains, but why spend money on bright blue ice packs when you can make your own right at home?

How To: 10 Ultra-Practical Uses for Your Hair Dryer (Besides the Obvious)

Hair dyers are pretty straightforward tools, but they can actually do way more than just dry your wet hair or defog your bathroom mirror. From the kitchen to the backyard, a blowdryer can help you solve common problems around the house and beyond, and here are our 10 favorite uses.

How To: Make an Impossible-to-Find Doortop Safe to Hide Secrets, Cash, & Other Valuables

Thanks to the internet and its increasingly lack of privacy, secrets don't even seem safe in our own homes anymore. So how do you hide your secrets, stash your cash, or keep your valuable jewelry out of sight where no one can find it? Well, the answer might be right above you... if you're standing under the threshold of a door, that is.

How To: Make an Ovitrap Mosquito Trap

Do you have a major mosquito problem? Well, here's a solution used by the military to drastically cut down their numbers.

How To: Make a Mini Grill Out of a Wire Hanger & Foil Pans

It is a beautiful, yet scorching day here in Los Angeles, and the only reason I would ever step outside from my air-conditioned castle would be to grill out by the pool. There's just one problem: backyards are few and far between here in The City of Angels.

How To: Refill an Air Duster Can with a Bicycle Pump

In this life hack video, I am going to show you how you can refill your air duster can with a bicycle pump.

How To: This Hack Makes It Easy to Inflate an Air Mattress Without a Pump

Air mattresses are great when you have guests sleeping over or want to camp in total comfort, but air mattress pumps are a different story. An electric one is loud and doesn't do much good at the campsite, while a manual one is easily broken or forgotten about. Luckily, there is an alternative to inflating an air mattress using your own breath, and it's easy.

May the Fourth Be with You: 4 Ways to Celebrate Star Wars

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a man by the name of George Lucas wrote an amazing trilogy about a new world and the power of the Force… and then subsequently ruined the franchise 22 years after the original release date.

How To: Remove Scratches & Scuff Marks in Your Car's Paint Job with Toothpaste

Whether you drive a new or used car, discovering a new dent, scratch, or scuff mark can send you into a frustration spiral. While there are many DIY ways to deal with dents, scratches and scuff marks are trickier because using the wrong stuff could make your car's paint job look even worse.

How To: Use Nuts to Repair Small Nicks & Scratches in Your Wood Furniture

Furniture gets beat up—it's a fact of life. Your beautiful tables will end up scratched, the legs of your chairs will grow nicked, and you'll find interesting dents and damage in other places around the house, too. Yet if most of your furniture is made of wood, you don't have to live with unsightly scratches. In fact, you can remove years of damage with a simple snack food: nuts.

How To: Use Ice Cubes to Get Furniture Indents Out of Carpets & Rugs

Once your furniture is finally moved in, settled upon a spot, and used for comfort or leisure, chances are it won't move very often. We tend to leave—and use—our furniture in the same spot for years, which can leave signs of great wear beneath, deeply indenting our carpeted floors and fancy rugs.

How To: 10 Clothes Iron Hacks Everyone Should Know (Flatirons Aren't Just for Clothes!)

Ironing is a serious chore: hot, unpleasant, and frustrating all in one, but necessary if you don't want to look like you crawled out of bed just before work. While you might only turn to your flatiron when faced with wrinkled clothing, this little appliance packs the power to tackle even greater challenges—and here are our 10 favorites.

How To: Use a Seam Ripper to Remove Hair & String More Easily from Your Vacuum's Brush Roll

Vacuuming is an easy, almost effortless task. With a few pushes of the vacuum, we can pick up pet hair, loose fluff, and other dirt and debris tracked across our floors. Yet there's one culprit that's harder to beat than all others—long strands of human hair.

How To: Use Those 'Useless' Leftover Toilet Paper Tubes to Clean in Tight Spots

How many times have you thrown out the remaining cardboard tube from an empty roll of toilet paper? Most of the time, they don't even make it to the recycling bin, and with the average American using over 20 rolls each per year, that's over 6.4 trillion tubes being wasted each year. Yet these small tubes are particularly valuable helpers around the home, especially when it comes to cleaning, so why toss them out?

How To: Keep Your Car Windows Fog-Free Using This Creative Hack

Whether you live in foggy California or icy Massachusetts, you've more than likely struggled with a cloudy, vision-impairing window that makes even the shortest commute impossible.

How To: Use Vinegar & Baking Soda to Fluff Up Worn-Out Bath Towels

It feels great to wrap up in a big, fluffy towel after a steamy shower, but it's frustrating when that towel isn't quite up to the job. Over time, towels lose their ability to hold water and dry as needed thanks to daily use and the biggest culprit—laundry detergent.

How To: Use Extra Shower Curtain Rods to Increase Bathroom Storage & More

If you're anything like me, clutter scattered across the bathroom counter, on the shower floor, or on any other available space is maddening. Who enjoys a mess of shampoos, scrubs, and sponges strewn around their feet or just out of reach in the shower? What can you do when space is limited?

How To: Make Long-Lasting, Wax-Free Candles for Your Home

Scented candles tend to magically turn a house into a home. The light flicker of the flame gives a relaxed or romantic tone to the atmosphere, and keeps the space smelling fragrant for hours. The only problem? Wax melts, and the candle becomes worthless after the wax is all gone. So how do you keep the flame going for more than a few hours? Simple, just remove the problematic ingredient—don't use wax!

How To: Make an Elegant No-Gas, No-Electricity Heater for the Winter

The weather outside might be frightful, but heating bills are downright scary this time of year. Heat is absolutely essential during the winter season, but it's also really expensive. If you aren't blessed with a fireplace or unlimited disposable income, fear not, because you can still heat your home on the cheap using flower pots and tea lights—even if the power goes out.

How To: Extend the Life of Your Disposable Razors & Keep Them Sharp

Early in the morning, there's almost nothing worse than discovering your razor is dull midway through your pre-work routine. No matter how hard you try to preserve those precious blades, it can seem like they're dull every time you reach for the razor. With one, seconds-long step after each use, you can save your razor blades and make them last longer.

How To: Make Grilled Cheese in the Toaster!

Today we show you how to make a grilled cheese in the toaster! Making a grilled cheese in the toaster is So Easy a Guy Could Do It!

How To: 5 Cheap Life Hacks for Organizing Your Bathroom

There comes a time in relationships when two people decide to move in together, and when this happens, you learn two things:

How To: DIY Pedal-Powered Phone Charger for Your Bike

Being healthy and active will help you live longer, but finding the strength to work out? That's hard. What does it do for me right now? I mean, here I sit, writing this article, thinking about going for a run, and I feel good just for thinking about running. But will I do it? Nah, I'm too lazy.

How To: The Simple No-Prop Method for Fixing a Wobbly Table Super Fast

As sure as death and taxes, sitting at a wobbly table at one time or another is inescapable. With your weight on it, the table shifts from one end to the other, lifting one leg in the air and then the other; a parade of seesaws, especially if you have someone sitting on the other end.

How To: Make a Smartphone Projector for Less Than $5

There's nothing better than gathering up all the cushions, pillows, and blankets in your home and having a good ol' fashion movie night. But if you're still rocking the old 19-inch TV your parents gave you in college, you may want to upgrade to something bigger.

How To: DIY Candle-Powered Fan Keeps You Cool at Home Using Fire

Staying cool in the summer heat sometimes feels like it takes all the energy in the world. But what about a fan using no-cost electrical energy? If you're looking to keep cool during a power outage, or if you don't want to break the bank by running your DIY air conditioner all day long, you can use candlelight to power a fan!

How To: Keep Cool Outside with This Overhead DIY Water Misting Rack

Summer is here, and with the season comes more freedom and searing heat. It's the ultimate between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place situation. You want to be outside and enjoy the sun, but you don't want to be over-powered by it. Thankfully, you can create makeshift misters on the cheap to enjoy the summer heat right on your deck.

How To: Organize Your Cable Clutter with Sugru & Mini LEGO People

No matter how organized your workspace is, chances are you still wind up with tangled cords dangling off your desk. Sure, there are a lot of ways to keep your cables separate, from strategically placed binder clips to stretchy socks, but none are as fun as using a LEGO minifigure.

How To: Rock Your Next Summer Party (10 Insane Tricks for the Perfect Backyard Bash)

Parties are a great way to celebrate and have fun with your good friends, so to make sure your next party rocks, I've assembled some of the biggest life-hackers on YouTube to bring you 10 outrageous party tricks your guests will not forget.

How To: Make a Non-Extinguishable WD-40 Stove

Stove that you cant extinguish very easy. To make this survival stove, you will need WD-40, a paper towel, and a lighter.

How To: Make the Bitty-Q (A Mini Outdoor BBQ from Drink Cans)

In this project, I'll show you how to make an itty-bitty outdoor BBQ from leftover beer or soda cans. It's the perfect summertime hack if you don't have a grill and are cooking for a small group of people—one bratwurst at a time. You can grab the wire grill template here.

How To: Charge Your Cell Phone with Fire

There are plenty of times when we need to charge our phones but don't have access to electricity. Whether the power is out do to storms, you're camping and run out of juice, or you're in a Tom-Hanks-like Castaway situation, it's important to have a charged phone in case of an emergency.