43 brilliant NEW home hacks you need to try!! (you won't believe #22)

I have some amazing home hacks to share with you guys today and there are a lot of them so buckle up, let's do this. To make this a little easier, I have organized today's hacks into the following categories and we are going to get started with cleaning. For the first two hacks, you're going to get a broomstick handle. I just get mine right from the Dollar Tree. You can attach basically any duster using a zip tie. You could even just like put a balled up sock at the end of these. Then you can use it to get up into any hard to reach areas, up high, whether you have vaulted ceilings. You don't need to have like eight different extendable different dusters or whatever. Get a single broomstick handle and you can reach them all. And if it's a really high location, just zip tie two broomsticks together. For the second hack, using this same broomstick handle, I'm actually going to get one of the sort of thicker brooms. These are like the outdoor broom heads that you can get and these are amazing for cleaning your shower, like specifically along the floor because this way you don't have to bend all the way over to scrub the tile. You can just put your cleaner down. You could scrub using this broom head. The reason I like this broom head better than a standard broom head is it's much more stiff, so you're really going to be able to clean into the tile and into the grout and you save your back at it. Because I'm going to be honest, I'm not 19 anymore. I know that it looks like I am, but I'm not. This next hack is when you are done cleaning any of your like chrome finished faucets or even if you have like door poles or whatever, is to use a piece of wax paper on these. What's going to happen is there's actually going to be like a little bit of invisible residue from the wax paper that's going to transfer onto the chrome and this is going to prevent fingerprints from building up on your faucets and your finishes. Another hack for cleaning your shower is to get yourself one of these dish wands and you're just going to fill it up with one of your favorite shower cleaners and then this works as the easiest way to just like wipe down your shower. I literally keep one in the shower and when I'm in the shower, I can just like quickly scrub down the wall, scrub down the tile, like getting into any of the little corners. I love it because the cleaner just stays right inside of the wand. Honestly, I like dish wands for cleaning showers way more than I like them for actually cleaning dishes. And while we're in the shower, if you have a shower that has glass doors, one of my favorite tricks is to actually use Rain-X on it. Rain-X is obviously for your car, you use it on the glass to help the water bead up, but this works great in showers too because it's going to help the water bead up so you're less likely to get water spots once the water dries. Now you can always squeegee your showers after use, that's really the best practice, but if you have maybe children or like guests or husbands or whatever that maybe aren't going to do this, Rain-X is a great way to help prevent those water stains. A toilet cleaning hack that I love is when you go into the bathroom, you're going to clean the bathroom start by taking some toilet paper, I like to spritz mine with a bunch of vinegar, but you can use whatever your favorite toilet cleaner is, and just shove it up into the rim of the toilet bowl, because this is where all that like yuck and smell and whatever accumulates, and then just let it sit there while you are cleaning the rest of your bathroom. Come back, do the toilet last, this will sort of sit there and help to break up all the grime and all of the junk and all of the smell, and because it's toilet paper then you can just flush it down when you are done. A hack that I love for garbage cans, if you have a garbage can where the trash bag keeps constantly falling back inside of it, certainly you can tie it into a little knot, but that's just extra work, and who wants extra work? Just take two command hooks, hang them upside down on the outsides of your garbage can, and then you can use the handles of the garbage bag to clip onto these, and this is going to prevent the garbage bag from falling inside of the trash bag every single time you go to put food in. My favorite hack for cleaning a stainless steel sink is to just use a little bit of baking soda, which is a micro exfoliant. I sprinkle this all over the entire sink, and just scrub down all the yuck and dirt and grime that has built up on your stainless steel sink. It's going to take your stainless steel sink from grimy and gross to shiny in literally just a couple of minutes. If you use wooden cutting boards, my favorite way to clean them is to sprinkle them with some coarse salt, and then you're just going to use half of a lemon. You can even use a lemon that you had juiced already, and then you're going to just scrub the coarse salt with the lemon. The lemon juice acts as like a natural cleaner, but then obviously the coarse salt acts as sort of like an exfoliant, and it's going to just disinfect and scrub down your cutting board, leaving it nice and clean. Rinse it, leave it out to dry, and you've got a nice, beautiful wooden cutting board. I like to do this with wooden cutting boards like once a week. If you have been placing dishes in your dishwasher all facing the same way, you have been doing it wrong. Typically, in dishwashers, water tends to come up the center, so you actually want your dishes to be facing all inwards so that they get the most clean. If you have a knife that has developed some rust spots, there's a really easy solution for this. You're going to take a tall glass and mix it with equal parts of lemon juice and water, and then you're going to soak this knife in it. I find that 10 to 20 minutes is usually a really good time, and then you can basically buff away the rust spots using the back of a sponge. If you have really rough rust spots on the knife, you can leave it soaking for a little bit longer, but this will basically help to break away the rust and leave your knives shiny and clean. Here's a laundry hack for you. Keep a dryer erase marker in your laundry room, and this is why. Sometimes when we are washing things, there are things that go into the washing machine that aren't supposed to go into the dryer, and you can take the dryer erase marker and write right onto your machine what needs to come out, because this will remind you when you go to switch from the washer to the dryer, remember to take that item out so it doesn't go in the dryer and get ruined. Speaking of the laundry, did you know you can make your own dryer sheets? I love this because it's obviously a lot more sustainable and it's going to save you a lot of money. You're just going to take a Tupperware, you're going to mix it with water and some fabric softener, and then take some sponges. You want the sponges that don't have any of the scrubby back to them. I get mine at the Dollar Tree. Cut these into half, and then just let them soak in this water mixture. When you're ready to put clothes into the dryer, grab one of these sponges, throw it in, run your dryer as normal, and then when you're done, take that sponge back out, put it back into the solution, and you can continue to use these dryer sheets over and over and over again. If you're somebody who hangs your clothes, you might sort of avoid it because it feels like it takes forever. I found the easiest way to fold my clothes is not to do it one by one, but instead to lay all of my clothes flat that need to be hung, and then you grab all of your hangers and you basically put the hanger on one and then just fold the top over, and then you can put the hanger on the next one and fold the next one over, and put the hanger on the next one and fold the next one over. This seems like such a simple little concept, but it's actually so much faster than hanging your items one by one. You can now just pick up the entire load and put it right into the closet. If you get water stains on your glassware, a coffee filter can actually be one of the best ways to buff these away. They obviously, unlike paper towels, are not going to leave any dust particles or whatever. I feel like especially wine glasses always get water stains on them. If you have a sock laying around, which I'm sure you do because at some point you've had a sock that has lost its match, where did its match go? We don't know. Take this lone sock and you're going to take a little bit of rice, mix it with an essential oil, and fill up your sock, and then just tie it closed, and this creates a really great DIY air freshener. You can keep these in dressers, and closets, and gym bags, and diaper bags, and backpacks. My last two cleaning hacks is that toothbrushes are the ultimate cleaning tool that we never talk about. I love toothbrushes for cleaning grout. They're just the perfect little size. One of my favorite mixtures is to use some baking soda, some hydrogen peroxide with a little bit of dish soap to clean inside of the grout for any tile that you have that is hard to get at. Toothbrushes are also the best tool to clean the cracks and crevices of toilets. Honestly, I'm not going to lie. It's 2023, and I don't understand how we haven't invented a toilet that doesn't have so many cracks and crevices. We all know the toilet's getting gross. Why are you creating so many little spots where the grossness can accumulate? I'm not sure. A toothbrush is one of the best tools to get into those little cracks and crevices for your toilet. Make sure you keep some spare toothbrushes in the bathroom. Just keep them somewhere different so you're not mixing them up with your regular toothbrushes. Let's move along to some food hacks. I have been on a mission for the last 15 years of my life, which is a little bit of an exaggeration. But probably for the last decade, to find the best way to do hard-boiled eggs. I actually have an entire video where I was doing Easter hacks, and I tried four different ways for making a hard-boiled egg and then peeling the hard-boiled egg that would be easier, and all of them were fails. I've tried pretty much every hack that exists. Don't tell me you have some hack that works, because I tried it, and for whatever reason, it didn't work for me until I finally found this hack, and that is to air fry your eggs. Put your air fryer on the bake setting or just whatever setting lets you go down to 250 degrees. Once it's preheated, put your eggs in for about 15 minutes, and then you're going to put them directly into an ice bath. Stick them in the fridge, and when you are ready to peel them, they will peel off so easily. Next hack, did you know if you roll your orange before you peel it, it's going to make it a lot easier for the peel to come off? You're never going to peel an orange without rolling it again. Now, I am 35 years old, and I am still somebody that when I open a bread bag, I will lose the little bread tag. Where does the bread tag go? I don't know. I like to think the bread tags in all of our lost socks are somewhere together. They've created a community, and they're living happily, just like harvesting off the land. They have a little commune, and every Friday they get together, and they play their acoustic guitars around a campfire. But that doesn't really help me when I'm trying to close my bread. But luckily, you can actually close bread bags really easily without the bread tag. You're just going to go ahead and twist it a few times to get it closed, and then you're going to take the excess that's over the top and fold it down back over the bread loaf. Now you've got a bread bag that is staying closed without the bread tag. This next hack is for cutting more bite-sized watermelon, especially great for little fingers. You're going to start by cutting the watermelon in half, and then you're going to place the watermelon cut side down onto your cutting board. You're then going to basically just cut this into a grid. I'm going to be honest, the first few times I did this, I always thought it would fall apart as I was cutting it, but it doesn't. And then you can just pull out the perfect little bite-sized pieces of watermelon. I find these are much easier to cut and to eat than the triangles are, again, especially for small children. Okay, this next hack is so cool. You can actually cook corn inside of a cooler. Why do you need to cook corn inside of a cooler? This is maybe if you're having a really big barbecue and you want to cook a ton of corn at once. Maybe you're doing 10 or more. In this example where I'm showing you, I'm not cooking 20 ears of corn because I don't have enough people to feed 20 ears of corn to, and I didn't want to be wasteful, but I put a couple of ears of corn inside of a cooler, and then you're just going to add boiling water to this. Let it sit for about 8 to 10 minutes, and you're going to have perfectly cooked corn that you can do in bulk. If you have a pantry item that you are constantly measuring with a measuring spoon, consider putting just a piece of masking tape across the opening of this pantry item, and that works as the perfect little level every time you are measuring. You can get the perfect measure every single time. This next hack is how to vacuum seal in a plastic baggie. By removing most of the air from your food in your bag, it'll last a lot longer in the fridge or freezer. So you can simply submerge the bag into water, then seal the top closed. The water will push out all the excess air, leaving your bag vacuum sealed. Okay, when I learned how to properly cut a mango, it changed my life, because I love mango. My kids love mango. I hate cutting mango. And then I finally one day was like, why don't I peel this mango with a vegetable peeler first? Which is what I did. You can peel the mango, take off all the skin, then you can just go ahead and cut around the core of the mango and get as much fruit as you need from it. Literally the only way that I do mangoes now. My final food-related hack is using a milk frother. I love my milk frother, but I actually use it for more than just frothy milk. I also use it for making dressings. Specifically, I like to make a lot of sauces in my own salad dressings. And I don't want to have to whip out my whole handheld mixer. The milk frother is the perfect little grab-and-go item, and it works great for emulsifying your salad dressings or mixing together any little sauces that you're making for dinner. All right, we're moving along to storage and organization hacks. First up, I love using command hooks on my pantry storage bins to hang any scoops or teaspoons or whatever item I'm using to scoop these out with. That way they're just always right where you need them. Also really great for kids if it's something that you're getting them to serve for themselves, whether you're having them get their own snacks or their own cereals. This seems like kind of a dull hack, but I added command hooks to the side of my oven when we used to have the oven in a place where the side was exposed. And then I could just hang my pot hangers right here. Again, this seems like super obvious. I also love using command hooks to hang baskets. So I love doing this inside of cupboard doors to make more use of unused space. I've talked about this hack a ton of times because I literally use it all of the time. So good in rental properties and small places where you don't have a lot of room for storage. You can also use it for bigger baskets as well, hanging onto the side of a vanity or onto a wall or whatever and easily create some extra storage space where you didn't have any. My next hack is clear museum gel. If you haven't used this stuff before, it is seriously life-changing for so many different things. I love using it inside of drawers to keep any of the bins I have inside from like moving around and shifting. If you don't know, museum gel is basically just this like clear gel that will help sort of adhere two items together, but then it is 100% removable. A kitchen storage hack that I always like to mention. This isn't maybe necessarily a hack, but it's just something to consider. Typically, we think of keeping all of our kitchen stuff in the kitchen, but if you're somebody who lives in a small kitchen, I've had so many small kitchens in my life. It might not always make sense to store all of your kitchen appliances in the kitchen, especially appliances you're not using that often. So really just think about your most used kitchen appliances to keep in the kitchen and any of those appliances that you're not using monthly or maybe even weekly. See if there's somewhere else that you can store them. You know, if you have a pan that you're pulling out just for the holidays, keep that thing in the basement. Okay, final storage hack is for all of your plastic bags that accumulate in the kitchen. I've seen hacks where people put them inside of old Kleenex boxes, but that only allows you to like hold a couple of plastic bags. So instead, just save some random shipping box that you got from Amazon or whatever. If you want to get really fancy, you can cover it in like kraft paper so it looks nice, but you're basically going to cut a hole out of the top of this, and then you're going to put your plastic bags in here, and as you put them in, you're just going to feed the end of one bag through the handles of the bag before it. So this way, as you pull your bags out, it's going to pull the next bag up so it's available for you, kind of like Kleenex. Okay, moving along to just some basic home hacks. We started this video out with using a broomstick. Another way to use a broomstick is for outside. You can actually get two just like over-the-door hangers. I get these ones just from the Dollar Tree, and hang these over like any fence or gate that you have in your backyard, and then put the broomstick on this, and it works as a great place to hang out towels or just like to dry your kid's swimsuits or whatever. We don't have a pool or anything, but my kids do a lot of water play outside in the summer, and this just acts as a really quick and cheap way to have a place to dry this stuff. If you have wood floors, you probably had to deal with the little like felt covers that go on the bottom of your chairs and your table so that it's not scuffing up the wood, which means you probably have dealt with the frustration of them constantly falling off. I have found a better solution. You get these chair leg covers. They're basically like the felt piece built into like a rubber piece, and so the rubber just slides over the chair leg so that it stays on and it's not constantly falling off. Make sure that you're checking the size of these. They come in different sizes depending on like the width of the leg that you're trying to cover. If you have a rug in your home that's constantly curling on the corners, you can buy rug corners. These are basically just like sticky pieces that stick onto the rug, and then will stick then onto the floor to keep the rug from curling up, but then when you need it to, it comes up off the floor without any issues. Okay, did you know that you can buy rechargeable light bulbs? Because I didn't know, and when I found out, I thought that it was pretty life-changing. You can buy these light bulbs that are literally rechargeable, which means you don't have to have it plugged into the wall. So this is great if you have a lamp that's somewhere that you want like for decorative use, but it doesn't have an outlet available, or maybe you're hanging up a light, a wall sconce, and you don't want to have to drill into the wall, and you don't want the wire hanging down. These light bulbs are completely rechargeable, which means you can use them with no electrical source. Also, a really great hack to have, if you lose power, you'll always know that you have a couple light bulbs that still work. Speaking of tricky places to plug things in, I love these ultra-thin socket covers. These are basically really thin covers that will go over a wall socket, but then it has a wire that comes down and out, so you can then continue to plug stuff into this outlet. I love this for a couple of reasons. One, it's just a better look if you have an outlet that's like sitting out somewhere really obvious, and seeing all of the things plugged in just looks kind of ugly. But it's also really great if you have a place where furniture is right up against the wall, and so the things that are plugged into that outlet kind of stick out and push into the furniture, or you can't push the furniture all the way up to the wall. These outlet covers are perfect. We actually have one in our appliance garage in our kitchen so that we can fit our coffee machine in there, because we wouldn't be able to fit the coffee machine if the outlet was sticking all the way out. So, I wouldn't be able to close the door. So, we used one of these thin covers to fix that. Okay, next up, you can buy these universal caster wheels. These essentially just are adhesive, and then you can stick them onto the bottom of any appliance that you can easily slide the appliance around. This is great for any appliances that you keep underneath your kitchen counters, and you want to be able to pull them out and use them, and then slide them back in really easily. It also works really great on the bottom of storage bins if you have storage bins in a place that you want to be able to easily pull out and access, and then slide back in. I just think these are a really smart product to make something basically easier to slide in and out of something. If you've ever seen those flower arrangements that have these big, beautiful flower arrangements in a low bowl or a long, skinny bowl, and you kind of wondered how they did it, this is how. You're going to take some tape, masking tape or just scotch tape or whatever, and create a grid over the receptacle that you want to put flowers in, and then you can essentially use each one of these as a mini vase to fill the entire thing with flowers. This works on all sorts of different bowls and vase sizes to make it something you can put flowers in that maybe you wouldn't have been able to before. If you have a door in your house that is kind of drafty, you can actually make a DIY door draft stopper for literally no dollars with just items you have in your house. You're going to get two of the inside rolls from gift wrap or craft paper if your kids use craft paper, and then you're going to get a pantyhose. You're going to cut one of the legs off, and then you're just going to slide the two roll tubes into the pantyhose, and then you can slide this onto the bottom of your door. Now you've created a really easy draft stopper, and you don't have to spend any money on it. If you ever need to hang something in a pinch and you're lazy like me, and you don't want to get out a measuring tape and a level and mess with all of that, just get yourself a piece of painter's tape or masking tape. You're going to take this, and you're going to put it on the back of your frame, and you're going to mark out any of the places that there are the little hangers, and then you can take this piece of tape and hang it up on your wall, and you will know exactly where to drill your holes or to nail in your nails for hanging this item. It also works really great for hanging a couple of things, because you can sort of visualize where each one is going to go before you do it. Okay, if you want some at-home s'mores, but you don't have a fire pit or a place to make s'mores, you can make your own DIY s'mores roasting kit. This is so fun. It would be super cute for a party or whatever. Basically, you just need a terracotta pot. Fill it up with some aluminum foil, and then just take a couple of the charcoal bits that you use for a charcoal grill, and you're going to light these on fire. Let them burn off for like 10 or 12 minutes, and you're just going to be left with super hot coals, and you can actually toast marshmallows on this. I tested this one time, and I was able to toast marshmallow after marshmallow after marshmallow for making s'mores without having an entire fire. My last little basic home hack is for hot glue guns. If you ever use a hot glue gun, you know that when you go to stick the next hot glue stick inside of the hot glue gun, and you're pressing it, it's always like you're having to push it down a few times before it finally grabs onto the piece that grabs it. Before you stick that hot glue stick into the gun, just take the end of it, touch it to the nozzle of the hot glue gun so that it softens and gets hot, and then you stick it in. This way, it will attach to the hot glue stick that is already in the gun, and you won't have to keep pushing it down in there because it's just already attached, and it's going to make hot gluing a lot easier. All right, my friends. That does it for some of my best home hacks that hopefully will make your life a lot easier. Thanks for sticking with me for this entire video. I hope that you enjoyed it, and as always, I hope you're having a fantastic day. Remember to be kind to yourself and others, and I will see you all in my next video.