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SALT LAKE CITY — Taking care of a house is hard. Heck, just continuing to stay alive and fully clothed is hard. At least if you're like me. But rest assured, you don't need to become Lord Grantham and take up care for your estate full-time in order to have a functional home. It can get easier, and there are some ridiculously easy ways to make it easier. When you combine easy with easy, you get a life hack. Bam. Knowledge. Dropped.
Put pancake mix in an old ketchup bottle
Mornings are perhaps the worst time for wanting to do anything at all that benefits either you or the world at large. Cooking even the simplest of breakfasts — be it for yourself, your kids, your significant other or your dog — is a waking nightmare, which is made doubly worse by the nightmare you probably had during the night about the nightmare waking up in the morning was going to be.
Worry no longer. When you're in a genius enough mood to think more than two hours into the future, place some dry pancake mix in the biggest cleaned-out plastic squeeze bottle that formerly contained a condiment you can find. Any pancake mix will do. When you want pancakes, add the right amount of water and shake. Instant pancake mix, no mess, and you can refrigerate what you don't use. It might lose its vigor after a day or so, but whatever. Life isn't perfect. There are tradeoffs in this world.
Stop using shoe organizers for only shoes, dummy
They may market them as "shoe organizers," but, when you think about it, it's an organizer and not a cop. Use it for what you want. Spices hanging from your pantry door? Done. Cleaning supplies hanging from your laundry room door? Small computer cables and electronics? Yes and yes.
These things cost like $11 at a department store and will change your life. You'll be a new person. You'll wake up every morning feeling so great that you might actually not need the pancake-in-a-bottle idea above.
Use old hangers for the shoes that used to be in your shoe organizer We just told you to use your shoe organizer for not-shoes, and now you have a shoe organizational nightmare on your hands because there are spices where your suede used to be. This is not a problem. Or at least not a problem without a solution, so long as you have old wire hangers and a pair of needle-nose pliers.
Cut the bottom off the hanger with the clippers that are on most pliers. Then bend the ends of the hanger that remains upward into a little curlie-cue loop. And you're done.
If you want to get fancy, or you just like functional things to also look nice (psh, lame) then you can decorate the hangers, in many ways, and there are guides online for that. But the main part about having a new device on which to place shoes is done long before that.
It's probably not robust enough for shoes much heavier than loafers or light sneakers, but then again you wouldn't have put anything much heavier than that in the shoe organizer you just put your old power cables in, would you have? No harm, no foul.
Drill some holes in your trash can so taking out the trash isn't the worst anymoreRoughly 50 percent of the problem with taking out the trash is how annoying it is to get the trash out of the trash can. There's the inevitable plastic-on-plastic vacuum that forms. Then you pull too hard, and the plastic rips and you need another bag and then there's a mess, and then crying, and then questioning about your choice to marry and live with whoever would leave that horrifying, half-eaten dinner out to rot, then throw it on the top of the trash and ask you to take it out. This is how marriages are broken.
Do the world a favor and take some money out of the hands of the divorce attorneys by drilling holes about two or three inches above the bottom of the trash bin on two or even all sides. This will allow air in, making it much easier to take out the trash bag full of the stuff that divorces are made of. The quicker you get rid of that bag, the safer your marriage is.
