MacGyverisms How-Tos

How To: Light a Fire with Your Pee!

This isn't looking good at all. What was supposed to be an easy day hike is quickly turning into a life-threatening situation. Your highest priority is to get a fire going before nightfall. But you can't use your water bottle because all of your clean water is gone. This is a challenge that's going to require a little more creativity... You're going to have to light this fire... with your pee! Can you use your PEE to START A FIRE? You'll know after you see this! If you like survival and fire-...

How To: Spice Up Your Kitchen with This DIY Magnetic Steel Rule Spice Rack

Spices are a necessary ingredient in any kitchen. It doesn't matter how good of chef you are—without proper spices, your food will always fall flat.

How To: Make a Personalized Home Bulletin Board for Cheap

One thing that's always important to have in your home office is a bulletin board, because they let you quickly display papers that you need to see every day, such as schedules, notes and memos.

How To: 10 Beautiful DIY Ways to Declutter Your Closet

Your closet is an area that holds important things such as keys, glasses, clothes and shoes. However, for some reason, it's always messy. Why is this? I know my closet is messy because I don’t have a lot of time to sit down and organize every little thing in there. I have never really even given much thought into organizing it.

How To: EnLIGHTening Home Hack! How to Change Hard-to-Reach Light Bulbs Without a Ladder

Unless you're living in some weird parallel universe where plug-in light bulbs are the norm for household lighting, chances are you've had to unscrew a light bulb every now and then.

How To: Save Over $30 on Kleenex with a Personalized Tissue Dispenser

So, this idea was born from a necessity to save. My household uses tissues a lot. I have two small kids, so they are extremely useful. The problem with tissues is that they seem to disappear in no time. So, whenever we ran out in-between shopping visits, my family would just use toilet paper.

How To: Mod an Oatmeal Container into a Paper Towel Dispenser

Paper towels are really cool. I like having them around for quickly cleaning up messes and what not. However, I do not have a stand or something similar for my paper towels, so it can sometimes get a bit taxing to pick up the roll and unravel it every time I need a towel.

How To: Make a Tear-Free Bath Rinse Cup for Kids

For those of us with small children, bath time can be very fun. Kids usually love splashing about and playing with their toys in the water! One thing they don't love however, is getting water in their eyes or on their face.

How To: Make a Yarn Dispensing Display Out of a Cardboard Box and Dowels

Yarn is very useful! If you know how to knit or crochet, you can make everything from clothing to backpacks. But when making large items from yarn, such as a blanket, it can be a bit of a hassle to have to change yarn bundles every time you want a different color or thickness.

How To: Turn an Old Fan Grille into a Decorative Plant Hanger

Everybody should have plants in their home. Not only do they give off oxygen, but they add a whole new level of decor and awesomeness to an otherwise drab room. So naturally, if you want to improve a room, just display a few plants.

How To: Organize Your Odds and Ends with These Easy DIY Magnetic Bins

Everyone has a junk drawer in their kitchen. It's like an unspoken rule. The junk drawer is full of all the strange bits of what not that accumulates in your home over time. Everything in there is useful, and you never want to throw any of it away for fear that you might need something in there one rainy day.

The Mega Solar Scorcher: Harness the Power of the Sun with Your Old TV

In this video, I show you a technique for hacking a four foot mega magnifying lens out of your old projection TV. Not only are these TVs everywhere, they can be found easily—for FREE!

How To: Slope Your Dish Rack Pan for Perfect Draining

Let's face it, pretty much everyone has an automatic dishwasher. They are super convenient and are becoming cheaper to allow the general public better access to them. With that being said, though, dishwashers are also becoming a lot smaller.

How To: Infuse Homemade Cooking Oils in Soda Bottle Containers

Flavored oils are amazing. They add a new flavor and depth to dishes not possible with plain oil. Most unfortunately, however, flavored oils almost always come with a hefty price tag to reflect their deliciousness and to capitalize on the general cluelessness of the public.

How To: Declutter Your Kitchen Counter with These DIY Magnetic Knife Strips

Magnetic knife strips are really handy. They allow for the removal of that huge knife block on your countertop, freeing up valuable counter space. They allow for easy access to your knives as you can mount them pretty much wherever you want. Plus, they look really cool, too!

How To: Make a Homemade Lightsaber from Junk!

This may not be something MacGyver would make, but it would be if he was dropped into the Death Star with a horde of Imperial stormtroopers hot on his trail. Especially if he found himself temporarily trapped in the trash compactor with some friendly Jedis, because this DIY lightsaber is made of pretty much all junk. Surely, he'd be able to find all of the parts, which include a broken camera lens, old hard drives, chrome pipe, film canister, busted microphone, and rubber mat. Some of the par...

How To: Steam Tons of Food at Once with a DIY Multilayer Steamer Basket

Steaming food has a lot of advantages over other cooking methods. The gentle heat of steam allows for meats, such as chicken wings, to become more moist after cooking.

How To: DIY Tin Can Cookie Cutters from Recycled Tuna Fish Cans

Making cookies is one of the best things in life, especially around the holidays. There is nothing better than getting together with friends and family and bonding by baking cookies.

How To: Build a Corn Dog Rig for Easy Deep Frying

Fairs and festivals are awesome, and one of the best parts about them is the food. Sure, it's all deep-fried and terrible for you, but it's so delicious. It's also always on a stick, which makes eating fried food even easier for us fat Americans.

How To: Make Neon Children's Umbrella Using EL Wire

Here's a children's umbrella lined with neon green EL wire. It's definitely an easy and fun project for kids to do with their parents, and more importantly, it keeps the little mischiefs safer if they're out and about on rainy days.

How To: Illuminate a Wheelchair for Safety Using EL Wire & LED Strip

I always found that those safety lights for bicyclists on the market were never good enough when riding in the dark. That got me thinking about people who use wheelchairs and how unsafe the night could be when they want to go out. So here's what I came up with:

How To: Amp Up Your Cell Phone's Sound System with a Plastic Cup

Everyone loves using their cell phones for everything except actually making phone calls. Whether it's watching streaming video, listening to music or playing video games, it would seem that calling people is almost an afterthought to cell manufacturers in this day and age.

How To: Make a Gunk-Free Toothbrush Holder from Junk

Brushing your teeth is a necessity. You don't want to walk around with yellow teeth and stinky breath, and it's common courtesy to those around you to care about your personal hygiene at least that much.

How To: Hassle-Free Shirt Folding in Seconds with This DIY Clothes Folder

Isn't laundry day the worst? You have to pack all your dirty, stinky clothes into a laundry bin. Then, you have to lug the often-times heavy bin all the way to wherever it is you have to do clothes. If you have a big family, like I do, then you might even have more than one bin.

How To: Eradicate Headphone Cord Clutter with a Spare Bobby Pin

Isn't putting headphones in your pocket the worst thing ever? It doesn't matter how strategically you place them in your pocket, or how neatly you place them in, they always come out looking like a highway crash. However, I have a quick fix for you that will combat those pocket gremlins that never fail to tangle pocket-stashed headphones.

How To: Mod a Pill Organizer into a Camping-Size Spice Shaker

Camping is wonderful isn't it? You get to go out into the wild, build a fire, pitch a tent, and tell ghost stories. My favorite part about camping isn't any of those things, though. No, the best part about camping in my opinion is the food. Whether it be planking freshly caught fish, roasting hot dogs, melting s'mores, or cooking hobo dinners, the food is always the most memorable part of camping to me because you get to eat stuff outside of the norm.

How To: Fuse a Grater and Used Milk Jug into a DIY Shredded Cheese Catcher

Cheese makes everything better. It's just a fact. Sandwiches, burritos, and even plain bread all get a benefited flavor quotient when cheese is involved.

How To: Add a Drill to Your Pepper Mill for Super Fast Grinding

Fresh peppercorns add a delicious and noteworthy touch to many dishes. Some of my favorite dishes that include peppercorns are pepper-crusted steak and peppered spread for crostini.

How To: Turn a Toilet Paper Tube into a Car Dash Mount for Your Phone

Everyone knows that using your phone and driving is illegal, and rightfully so. Tons of people die on the road everyday due to careless people texting or calling someone. Everybody knows that it's wrong, yet everyone still does it anyway.

How To: Cook a Stoveless Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Everyone loves grilled cheese sandwiches! They're delicious, portable, and evoke images of your childhood. They really are the ultimate comfort food.

Summer Cooling Tip: How to Upgrade a Handheld Fan into a Mister

If you're anything like me, the heat of the summer can often be unbearable. Where I live, it often gets as high as 108 degrees Fahrenheit, so anything that cools off is a welcome and amazing thing. Mister fans are especially amazing for cooling off, but they are usually very big and attached to buildings (which currently is way out of the picture for me.)

How To: Turn Your Charcoal Grill into a Tandoori Oven Using a Flowerpot

Indian food is amazing. One of the things that makes it so great and exotic is the cooking methods used. Among the best of these methods is the use of the tandoori oven, a cylindrical oven used to primarily cook skewered meat and various flatbreads with heats upwards of 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Regrettably, such heat and taste is hard to replicate in the average home kitchen.

How To: Create a Grease Splatter Screen Out of Pantyhose and a Wire Coat Hanger

We've all been there. You wake up early, hungry for breakfast, but not just any breakfast will do. You want bacon and eggs. So, you blindly stumble into your kitchen, underwear-clad, and begin fumbling about with pots and pans. After a few minutes, you fill your pan with delicious and smokey rashers and turn the heat on. Everything seems okay... until the bacon actually starts to cook. With a splat, burning hot grease flies out of the pan and bombards your skin, causing intense pain and great...