DIY Life

You've done it again. After writing your long letter to Aunt Martha -- on your homemade fabric flower cards, perhaps -- you've sealed the envelope, only to realize that you've forgotten to include little Harry's latest school photo.

You could either rip open the envelope, pop in the picture, and tape it closed, or you could try a sneaky way to open the envelope -- an undetectable way.

There's always steaming open the envelope, TV detective Veronica Mars' method of choice. This is wet and messy, though, so you may want to try putting the envelope in the freezer instead. Just a few hours in the zero -- or subzero -- environment, and the envelope should open on its own. You can reseal it after you put in Junior's picture.

I hope you aren't getting any illegal ideas, now that you're an expert at this....

When I saw this deodorant container hiding place the first thing that came to my mind was "you put your (contraband substance removed) in here". While it does look like the sort of thing you'd see people using in a bad stoner movie, it is also a very clever hiding place for all sorts of things. If you're on vacation and staying in a resort or hotel, you'll typically take your cash and valuables with you when you leave the room. With this handy little hiding place, you can put your jewelry or cash in the old deodorant container and rest assured that they are safely hidden.

Here's what you'll need to assemble your secret storage container:

1. Empty deodorant with the center stick left in place
2. Candle
3. Match
   
4. Masking tape

The full instructions explain how to put it all together and even show you how to make it look like a used deodorant stick.

Another handy use for an old container is as a q-tip holder. Stay tuned as this instructables author shares more cool uses for old deodorant containers.

You can buy secret compartment books, usually with a velveteen lining, in plenty of stores. However, they tend to be made from books which were expected to be best-sellers. These books are often connected to politics or current events (for a long time, they were all by the prosecutor in the original O.J. Simpson criminal trial).

I don't know about you, but that's not the kind of book I ever buy: a "secret compartment book" made from one of them would probably stick out like a sore thumb, even in my extensive personal library. It looks like I'm just going to have to make one of my own. This Secret Compartment Book video from MAKE could help... and I can help you make it even better, with the addition of a few more tools.

I don't have a sacrificial Haruki Murakami novel to use for this project -- you know, to really blend in with my collection -- but if you're a certain kind of reader, one who doesn't read best-sellers, this seems like the sort of thing for which the cheap hardcover classics sold by every chain book store would be great. Find a good, thick Tolstoy or Dickens (lots of room in those!) and go to town, or choose something long and boring that's already taking up space on your own shelves.

This would make a great gift... or an amazingly sneaky gift box. If you'd like to know more, please join me after the break.

[suggested via BoingBoing. Thanks, Ryan! I'm not saying Tolstoy and Dickens are boring, but rather that their books aren't in short supply.]

Recently, a lot of media attention has been given to various ways to increase storage space in a house. Wendy A. Jordan's book Making Room posits many possible examples, though most of them seem to come down to "knock out some drywall between beams and build shelving there" or "make the area under your stairs into a cabinet/closet/office/etc." This definitely won't work at my house, where the area under the stairs is the upper half of the stairwell that leads to the basement! No, we have to line the walls with shelving and hope for the best.

One of the coolest "increased storage" areas I've seen is in the family home of one of my friends, where there are two secret rooms. One isn't so much secret as "easy to miss" (it's a tiny room accessed from inside the garage), but the other is behind a bookcase. To get to it, you have to unload and move the entire bookcase, and he's always claimed it's "not that cool," but still: secret rooooooooom!

Now you, too, can have a secret room, by following this tutorial at WikiHow for a Hidden Door Bookshelf. You'll have a wall of useful shelving, and one of the units will hide a door! You're probably only going to keep all your valuables in your new hidden room, but it's so completely awesome that it's worth building anyway. (And that's a good thing: because you have to build a steel frame, it's a relatively complex project, definitely not for novices.)

Bonus: unlike my friend's hidden-room-bookshelf, it's built on a pivot, so you won't have to take everything off of it to get into the room itself.

[via Shelterrific.]

When I was a kid we lived across the street from a fellow who had what I thought was an uncanny ability to park his cars in his garage with perfect accuracy every time. There was always room to open all car doors without striking the other car and there was always room to get in and out of both cars from either side. His garage wasn't any larger than a standard two car garage and he also had some of the extras in there that many people do, such as a snow blower, a chest freezer and of course the lawnmower and some lawn tools. So how did this fellow get his cars situated in perfect fashion as a matter of course? I went one day to find the answer.

What our neighbor had done was to park his cars in the garage one day in the exact position that he wanted them. Then he took two tennis balls, threaded each one on a string line and hung them both from the garage rafters in position so each one would just touch the windshield of each car right in front of the rear view mirror. From then on, all he and his wife needed to do was ease in either car until the tennis ball came to rest on the windshield, in front of the rear view mirror. Presto! A perfect parking job every time.

Check out 17 good uses for a Tennis ball, from DIY Life's own Dan Chilton.