How-To Guides about Home & Garden

WIRED's testers already rated the Ego Power+ 880 CFM the strongest and quietest battery-powered leaf blower in their lineup. This week, the outlet showed how to make a leaf blower toilet paper cannon using that same model: tape a loaded paint roller to the nozzle, and the airflow pulls sheets off the roll and sprays them outward in seconds. This piece reports on WIRED's build, explains why the airflow does what it does, and lays out the safety boundaries worth knowing before anyone goes near a...

This guide walks through building a DIY Harry Bertoia Sonambient sculpture dupe: a tabletop cluster of 15 slender steel rods, cut into three length groups and set into a hardwood base, styled after the look of Bertoia's sculptural bush forms.

If lady beetles, boxelder bugs, or crickets have started showing up on sunny exterior walls or slipping indoors, resist the urge to swat them. Learning how to get rid of fall bugs in your house starts with that one rule: squashing a lady beetle or boxelder bug releases a stain-causing, foul-smelling fluid, and it's the single biggest mistake people make with these fall invaders. Multicolored Asian lady beetles specifically don't breed indoors. They're hunting for a warm crack to ride out...

Melissa and Wyatt Shipman had already DIYed most of their house over nine years of living there, but the basement half bath was the room they kept avoiding. It was a holdover from the early 1990s: dingy tan vinyl, an oak vanity, dim lighting, and a dusty blue toilet and sink. The couple set a $200 budget for the room and landed close, finishing at $203.76 without replacing the toilet, sink, or vanity, per the same source.

Most ink stains on washable clothes are not a lost cause. Most can be treated with supplies already sitting in a bathroom cabinet, which makes learning how to remove ink stains from clothes less intimidating than it looks, especially for a fresh ballpoint pen mark.

A full, layered fall mantel doesn't require a trip to the craft store. If your yard has hydrangeas drying on the stem, branches with turning leaves, seed pods, pinecones, or ornamental grasses, a few vases already sitting in a cupboard can turn them into a mantel display that costs nothing. These fall mantel decorating ideas work with whatever vessels are already on hand, as long as those vessels sit flat and stable and won't end up near any heat source, which makes this one of the easiest ways...

A Magic Eraser can wipe a scuffed door sill clean in seconds. Drag that same sponge across a painted hood, though, and the abrasion it leaves behind won't wash out, no matter how many times you rinse the panel afterward, because the sponge works by stripping away a thin layer of material rather than lifting dirt off the top of it. Figuring out what you can safely clean on a car with a Magic Eraser safely comes down to that one detail: melamine foam doesn't clean the way a soapy sponge does....

You're holding a bread maker used twice, a tangle of cords for gadgets you no longer own, or a sweater that might fit again someday. That freeze, where every item could theoretically still be useful, is exactly where most decluttering attempts stall.

Here's how to strip laundry when towels or sheets keep coming out of the wash looking dull, smelling musty, or feeling waxy, even though they're technically clean. That texture usually signals built-up residue rather than leftover dirt. Laundry stripping is a prolonged soak in hot water, borax, washing soda, and detergent designed to pull trapped detergent, fabric softener, body oils, and hard-water minerals out of fabric fibers.

Emptying the lint trap after every load feels like real dryer maintenance, and in a way it is. But laundry experts point out that this habit never touches the exhaust vent, the duct that actually carries hot, moist air out of your house. The lint screen only catches lint inside the machine; the vent is a separate system, and learning how to clean a dryer vent properly, not just the trap inside it, is the piece most households skip.

Dark spots creeping along the shower caulk send most people straight for a bottle of bleach and a sponge. That instinct skips a more useful question: Is this caulk still worth cleaning, or has it already failed? Learning how to remove mold from shower caulk starts with that diagnosis, because scrubbing a bead that's cracked or pulling away from the tile won't fix the problem if the caulk itself is damaged.

A narrow strip of wall by the front door can hold more than a coat hook and a shoe pile. This guide walks through checking whether your entryway wall can safely support a mounted wardrobe system, figuring out exactly what it needs to hold, and installing modular rails, shelves, and baskets so the space functions as clothing storage instead of a permanent pile-up by the door.

By the end of this guide, you'll be able to pick a color or storage upgrade that fits your actual walls and countertops, install it correctly for that surface, and take it down cleanly before handing back the keys. Removal matters as much as the decorating choice itself: a project that looks great on day one but damages the wall underneath can cost more than it saved. These small rental apartment decorating ideas work because they're matched to how a specific surface performs, not just how a...

The biggest mistake with natural pillows is treating them like a pillowcase and tossing the whole thing in the washer. Several fills can be permanently ruined by water. Kapok clumps for good once it's wet, and buckwheat hulls break down structurally in water, which also promotes mold inside the fill, according to Circadian Rest. Before you clean anything, you need to know exactly what's inside your pillow, because the right method for one fill can destroy another.

How to arrange furniture in a small living room comes down to one governing rule: circulation and function decide the layout first, and style gets layered on after. That's the rule behind every choice in this guide, and it's the rule one New York renter learned the hard way, tape measure in hand.

Painting oak kitchen cabinets blue can transform a dated kitchen without the expense and disruption of replacing sound cabinetry. The challenge is not applying the color. It is preparing the surface well enough for the finish to bond, cover evenly, and withstand daily use.

That grayish-brown haze across your lawn after mowing isn't fungal disease, drought stress, or grubs. There's a good chance it's a dull mower blade, and the fix takes less time than whatever treatment you'd otherwise be buying at the garden center.

Most people carry a low hum of guilt about cleaning: the countertops that only got a quick wipe, the bathroom that hasn't seen bleach in weeks, the couch cushions nobody has vacuumed under since spring. Public health guidance doesn't back that guilt up. In most homes, cleaning with plain soap, water, and some scrubbing removes most of the germs on a surface, no disinfectant required, according to CDC hygiene guidance.