Life Hack and DIY Lifestyle

Category: Life Hacks

DIY Project / Life Hack – Creating a backdrop for conference calls

admin

One of the issues I have run into with working from home is the need to be on camera in a room which might be used by others, who would appear in the background. In particular, our office space in the house has a closet behind it which my wife or I would need to use to get clothes or other items, resulting in one of us appearing in the webcam shot of the other.

I wanted to come up with a way of adding a screen or backdrop to cover the closet so we could use the closet while the other person is on the webcam and no one would know. The photo below shows what I came up with.

The backdrop is a thick tarp attached to a board via screws. The tarp is then hung up to the ceiling with Velcro strips attached to the board attached to the tarp, which connect to Velcro strips I tied to the heating vent in the ceiling. I love Velcro strips, you can learn more about Velcro strips in my blog post found here. The thick blue tarp I bought I found on Amazon here: Tarp Cover Blue, 2-Pack Heavy Duty Waterproof, Great for Tarpaulin Canopy Tent, Boat, RV Or Pool Cover!!! (8X10, Heavy Duty)

The backdrop works pretty well, below shows how it would look from a webcam perspective with and without the tarp.

No backdrop
With backdrop

I created a video summarizing the steps to create the backdrop and how the backdrop looks which is below:

This video summarizes the backdrop project.

Life Hack and DIY Project- Pegboard Belt / Tie Rack

admin

A long time ago I bought a pre-made belt rack, which was a horizontal piece of metal with a bunch of hooks. The issue I had with the belt rack was that often things wouldn’t fit right, such as being too big to fit. Also, I couldn’t adjust the spacing of the hooks on the rack at all.

A simple solution I came up with was to make my own belt/tie rack out of pegboard as shown below:

The pre-made belt rack I am referring to looks like the following picture:

This is a typical pre-made belt rack.

Creating the pegboard belt rack was very easy, I just cut some pegboard to size, attached it to the wall and insert pegboard hooks where needed. One thing to remember is not to screw the pegboard flush into the wall, you want the pegboard about a centimeter from the wall so that the hooks can fit in the holes and come through the back. You can purchase pegboard hook sets on Amazon, which provide hooks in various sizes. You can find a good set of assorted pegboard hooks on Amazon here: Pegboard Hooks Assortment, 54Pcs Pegboard Hook Organizer Accessories Set with 20Pcs Peg Locks.

Here is an example of the various types of hooks you will get in this type of set:

The pegboard belt rack has two advantages over the pre-made belt rack.

  1. It’s cheaper as pegboard it very inexpensive
  2. It’s easily customizable, unlike the pre-made belt rack. For example, you can easily adjust the spacing of the hooks, or swap out a hook for a different type of hook and so on

Here is video summarizing the steps to create the pegboard belt rack.

Hope you find this life hack / DIY project useful. As always, if you have questions e-mail me at lifehackanddiycontact@gmail.com.

Life Hack – Making Sure Your X-Mas lights stay in place

admin

I used to put my Xmas light on nails outside my house, but they would occasionally fall off due to wind or some other reason. Then I got the idea of using velcro strips to hang the lights to the nails. The velcro strips keeps the lights in place, as they have a small hole which is just the right size for the nail head. I would wrap the velcro strip around the light and then hang the strip on the nail through the velcro strip hole. An example of how this looks is below. Since I have started using velcro strips I haven’t had my lights come out once. More of the many uses of velcro strips can be found here: https://lifehackanddiy.com/things-i-like-velcro-strips/

X-Mas lights attached to a nail with a velcro strip
Here you can see several velcro strips being used to connect the lights to the nails.

Life hack for when buying liquids in bulk

admin

If you shop at Costco or a similar bulk purchase store, you probably end up with large bottles which are unwieldy, especially for products such as laundry detergent or bleach.

A simple way of handling these large bottles is to transfer the liquid to smaller bottles and use that to pour the laundry detergent, bleach or other liquid.

For example, I often buy a 200+ ounce bottle of laundry detergent. Then I transfer the detergent to an empty 60 ounce bottle, which is much easier to maneuver. I also often buy a 120 ounce bottle of bleach.  Then I transfer the bleach to an empty sport bottle, which again is easy to maneuver when filling the bleach dispenser.

This idea would work for any large bottle container, the main idea is to move the fluid to something which is easier to handle.

I took bleach and laundry detergent from two large bottles and but them into empty Gatorade bottles to make them easier to handle.

Life hack- A better, more cost effective alternative to the Swiffer Wetjet mop

admin

This isn’t so much a life hack as a better option than using the Swiffer Wetjet. The Swiffer Wetjet is the classic razor / razor blade type product: the initial purchase of the mop isn’t that expensive but the refills of cleaning liquid and cleaning pads add up over time and end up costing much more than the mop.

For those of you not familiar, the Swiffer Wetjet is a mop which uses battery power to spray out liquid and features disposable mop head pads and single use cleaning liquid bottles. A image of it is shown below.

Here is the Swiffer Wetjet mop

The pads are annoying in that they are single use and need to be thrown away. In addition to the cost they are not environmentally friendly. The cleaning liquid refill is also single use and the company goes out of it way to make it very difficult to refill. I once cut a hole and added a valve to refill it but it wasn’t really worth the effort. You can try to remove the bottle cap, but it is very difficult to take off and even harder to put it back on.

So what mop can do all the Swiffer Wetjet can do but without the single use refills which are the real cost? Welcome to the O-cedar mop. This is what it looks like, you can find it on Amazon here:

O-Cedar ProMist MAX Microfiber Spray Mop

Like the Swiffer it has a trigger which launches the cleaning liquid (but it is manual and doesn’t use batteries). However it has reusable cleaning pads which you can wash in the washing machine. They don’t last forever but should last for at least 50 uses. Also the cleaning liquid capsule has a screw up cap so you can use whatever cleaning liquid you choose. I bought a gallon of cleaning liquid concentrate which will convert to 64 gallons of cleaning liquid for $15. The exact concentrate cleaning liquid I bought can be found here on Amazon, I bought it four years ago and it is still more than half full.

Simple Green Industrial SMP11001 Clean Building All-Purpose Cleaner Concentrate, 1gal Bottle

Compare the resuable pads and refillable cleaning solution of the O-Cedar mop to the single use pads and non-refillable cleaning solution of the Swiffer Wetjet and you can see how the savings can really add up to potentially as much as $100 a year.

A summary video comparing the two mops is below: