I just saw this niffy idea on how to hold a nail for hammering. This is especially handy when you have a small nail and need to be precise with your hammer hits.
I just love this idea and found it so useful that I wanted to share it. All you need is a clothespin. Here is my personal photo using the unique nail holding technique.
I can’t wait to use this idea next time I have a nailing project. I’m sure it will save on my thumb too. 
Check out this cool idea for recycling a milk jug into a shovel. The plastic shovel would make a great play shovel for kids at the beach or in the garden. You could also use the shovel for scooping flour, sugar, or other bulk ingredients in the kitchen.
Here are my shovels I made using a one gallon milk jug. The key is to cut with very sharp scissors and make your cuts wide so you can trim the shovel shape evenly on both sides.
Source:
Korean Crafts Blog
Using dryer lint for firestarters isn’t a new idea but I just wanted to share a quick post in case you haven’t tried it yourself. I used to just throw my dryer lint out but then I found it has many handy uses one of which is that it burns easily. Just throw the little chunks of lint and into your woodstove or fireplace as you build your fire. I like to place a small ball of lint at the bottom of the wood stove with my newspaper and then place the kindling on top. Then put the match to the lint to light the fire and you will have a blazing fire soon.
One other useful tip is to save your lint in toilet or paper towel rolls. You shove the lint into the tubes after you clean out your dryer vent. I started doing this recently and it works great to just throw the paper tubes into my woodstove when I make my fire. The lint really is a great firestarter and plus it’s free. Oh and one last idea, if you are out in the woods and need a quick firestarter, check your pockets and get the lint out from the bottom of your pants pockets. Pocket lint works great to start a fire in a pinch.
Here is a frugal tip that I found works great to clean the glass on a woodstove. This is a natural and free way to clean your woodstove door glass.
First make sure the glass is cold or at least just warm. Wet some newspaper and add some ash from your woodstove to the paper. Use the damp newspaper with the ash to wipe off the inside of the glass. The wood ash acts as effective paste to clean off the glass. If you have some stubborn soot buildup just continue to scrub with the paste until it comes off. It does make a bit of a mess on the glass and a lot of elbow grease if you have a hard soot buildup to clean off.
Once you have the glass cleared of soot, let it dry. Then use a dry paper towel or rag to wipe off the glass for a final clean up of the woodstove door.
Promoting useful ideas has been around for years. Here is a vintage magazine cover that featured many different useful ideas. If you look closely you will see most of the items being used are very old or even obsolete. But like many useful ideas, some are timeless and still are very effective for saving you money or solving a problem.
As I move forward with My Useful Ideas.com, I hope to bring you helpful tips and ideas that you will find handy, frugal, and most of all useful for everyday living and beyond.
This is the inaugural post for My Useful Ideas. This is a blog where ideas are shared that are designed to save you money, help you solve a problem, answer a question, fix a problem, explain how to deal with a situation, and generally help you out. I am not an expert but will share with you ideas and solutions that I have found work and that are helpful in everyday use. Some of the ideas are very basic and which you may have read about in the past but I write to share my experiences and hopefully help out someone who may have not had to face the same challenge yet in their life.
So with that being said, I hope you will visit from time to time to see what I am writing about. I plan to talk about everyday challenges such as power outages, gardening, food storage, prepping, personal safety issues, homemaking tips, and many other frugal and useful topics.
