Grampa MacGyver Blog

  • Gardening With Milk Jugs

    Over the winter I had been rescuing all of the 4-liter milk jugs from the recycling bin. Recycling is a great thing to do with milk jugs of course, but I just couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to have plenty of useful plastic containers to help me with my gardening this spring, and all for free! Let me pass some on my ideas on to you and see you find them useful too.


  • Dead Lawnmower To Planting Cart

    Last summer my old lawn mower gave up the ghost. The engine was way beyond fixing and the cost of a new engine was just about the cost of a whole new mower so I bought a new mower but I still had the old one. See the deck, wheels and handle were still in good shape, I hated the thought of just getting rid of it but to keep it I had to find a good use for it.

  • Help Thy Neighbour

    The most expensive thing about owning your own home is the maintenance that comes along with it. It’s not even the supplies that it takes to do repairs so much, it’s hiring the labour to get the job done. Many of us do tackle our own projects because if we had to pay someone else to do it we just couldn’t afford it. We’ve discovered that by helping one another, we’ve been able to take on big joba for just the cost of the materials in most cases.

     

  • Fake Fireplace With Candles

    Our house has one of those old gas fireplaces in the living room that was disconnected years ago because it wasn’t safe to use. I’ve always liked the idea of a fireplace and even would have liked to have a real wood-burning one. However, fireplaces, especially older ones are rarely efficient and are often a good source of drafts in the house.

  • Boot Scraper From Old Skates

    Anyone who has ever had kids will eventually end up with a pair of skates that are so worn they cannot be passed down any more. I have given a couple of pairs of skates a new job as a boot scraper at our doors. It’s pretty easy to do if you’ve got a couple of basic tools.

  • Thinking Outside The Shelf

    I hate to waste anything, so even when stuff is broken beyond repair, I try to salvage anything on that item that might possibly be useful somewhere else.

  • Broken Table To Hall Table

    Even though I'm known as a fix-it guy, I have to confess - I've had a broken table leaning up on edge in the corner of my shop for nearly a year now. It was one of those fancy small round tables that was big enough to seat 4 people for tea.

  • Repurpose A Broken Dresser

     

    I’m known as a fix-it kind of guy, so whenever something falls into disrepair in the neighbourhood, I’m usually the one that gets called. A lot of the time, things can be fixed, but there are those occasions that you can never really fix something back to the standard of what you’d like. In cases like that, it’s time to use your imagination and see what you can do to repurpose the usable parts of the item into something else.

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