Turn Your Milk Jug into Garden Shovel

This week’s life hack does exactly what the title implies. You can turn a milk jug into a garden shovel. How? Here’s how!

Let me start off with a disclaimer. You may have varying degrees of success with this life hack. Milk jugs come in many shapes and sizes. Not all of them will be able to be cut into a perfect garden spade. I only personally tested this with a medium-sized milk jug that I bought at Jewel Osco. I have no idea if it would work on large milk jugs or containers from different grocery stores. I’m not made of cash. I only bought the one jug. If you would like to test it out with other jugs of different sizes feel free. Leave a comment below and let me know how it goes.

With all that being said, let’s get into the hack. I started by washing off the nutrition guide stickers that come on every milk jug. This may have been a mistake because it left over some sticky residue on the part of the jug that would eventually become the shovel.

Next, I grabbed a marker and marked the area I would cut out. This step isn’t mandatory. I just decided to do it because I thought it would be a helpful visual for this life hack. Then I cut along the dotted line. Well, I didn’t really cut it. It was more me poking holes along the line and dragging the shape end of the scissors down the line.

It was a little more difficult than I was expecting, but it wasn’t too bad.

In the end, it actually worked out pretty well. The medium-sized jug I used cut into a lovely shovel. Is this as good as a normal small gardening shovel you can buy? No. Metal shovels are more durable than plastic milk jug shovels. The plastic shovel was a little bit flimsy but I was able to do some digging with it. It would still be easier with a normal metal shovel though.

 

I have to admit, this isn’t the most useful life hack. I can’t really say that this life hack is for people who don’t want to spend money or for people who need a last-minute gardening tool. This hack takes too long to make for it to work last-minute and, honestly, I’m not sure if last-minute gardening is even a thing. If you’ve got the time and money to plant a garden, you probably have the time and money to go buy a real garden shovel.

I could see this being a fun arts and crafts project for kids though. Parents or grandparents could have a nice time making these shovels with their children or grandchildren and planting some flowers with them. Just as long as the child uses safety scissors or gets help cutting from the parent.
 

That’s it for this week of Life Hack Lab. Stay tuned for even more Life Hacks in the future!

I Made My Own Life Hack!

I’m switching up the formula for today’s blog entry. For the first time ever, I present to you a Life Hack that I discovered all on my own. That’s right, I didn’t find this hack online. I invented it.

The More Eraser Hack:

I’m going to tell you the story of how I discovered this hack. Believe it or not this hack took me, basically, my entire life to come up with. When I was little I always used to get annoyed when the erasers on the ends of my pencils would wear out.

I could always see that there was more eraser left inside the metal part of the pencil but as a child I just had no way of getting to it.

Fast-forward to middle school where I had the idea to peel off half of the metal by the eraser to get to that extra eraser. Doing this makes the eraser on your pencil take twice as long to fade away. I kept doing this for years.

Whenever I would run out of eraser on a pencil I would peel off some of the metal to get to more of the eraser.

Then, in high school I got a job as a tutor at Kumon Math and Reading Center. I still work there today actually. My first few years there I started noticing that the students would just stop using the pencils when the erasers wore out.

So, I would sometimes peel the metal parts of some of the pencils off during down-time so the students could use the pencils longer. Unfortunately, this just wasn’t very effective. Peeling off the metal with my bare fingers took a while and after the first few my fingers would start to hurt like crazy.

About a year ago I had, what I consider to this day to be, my greatest discovery ever! Sad, right? At Kumon, I have this little portable pencil sharpener that looks like this.

There is a hole for a normal number-two-sized pencil and a hole for a slightly bigger pencil. One day, about a year ago, I had the bright idea to take a pencil with a worn-down eraser, stick it backside into the big hole of the sharpener and sharpen it. Just like that, I had created my very own life hack.

It works beautifully. You can cut the metal off the extra bit of eraser that is inside the pencil very easily with a pencil sharpener.

This will work with pretty much any handheld non-battery-powered pencil sharpener. It is easier to use the standard slightly larger pencil hole found on many common pencil sharpeners but it also works on number-two-sized holes.

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Did he just write a five-hundred-word blog about one quick five-second life hack. Yes. Yes, I did.

Honestly, I was just so proud that I invented my own life hack that I had to share the story of how I figured it out. I’ve checked online and its seems like a very small percentage of people have also figured this hack out.

What did you think of my life hack this week? Do you know of any other eraser-related life hacks? Leave a comment. I’d love to hear about some. As always, see you next week on Life Hack Lab!