The Secret Yumiverse: Page 8

Whether you're moving out of your current living space or simply just want to clear up space, a garage or yard sale is a great way to make some extra cash while letting go of things you no longer need or have room for.

Even if you never plan on visiting a golf course for the rest of your life, it's still a good idea to have a few golf tees lying around the house. You never know when you might need to replace a small cap, stake a picnic blanket to the ground on a windy day, and (assuming that they are clean and new) hold a thick sandwich together.

If your love for Chinese takeout has left you with a pile of unused disposable chopsticks in your kitchen drawer, then you're in luck. In addition to being a very versatile eating utensil for pretty much any cuisine, chopsticks also come in handy for eating Cheetos without getting cheesy dust all over your fingers, pitting cherries, skewering food, stirring drinks, cleaning out dirt from hard-to-reach spaces, and more.

Bringing your lunch to work doesn't always have to involve boring brown paper bags and plastic ziplocks.

Is your epic snoring ruining your bed partner's sleep at night? The next time you go to bed, consider taping or sewing a tennis ball on the middle of the back of your nightgown or pajamas. Sleeping on the side instead of your back is one effective way to ensure a snore-free night.

Want to sear the perfect restaurant-quality steak in the comforts of your own kitchen? Use a cast iron skillet.

Like table salt, black pepper has its unexpectedly handy uses that goes beyond seasoning your meals at the dining table. You can use black pepper to keep ants from invading your home, drive away bugs from eating your delicious garden vegetables, temporarily fix a radiator leak, and even stop bleeding on a minor wound.

If you want to prevent your bathroom mirror from fogging up in the morning, simply rub shaving cream all over the surface before hopping into the shower.

Whether you use an iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android smartphone, it definitely doesn't deserve to get scratched up by car keys or other sharp objects that may be in your pocket or handbag. If you're too cheap to invest in a protective phone case, how about making your very own of duct tape and staplers?

If you can't stand the idea of tying a birthday present with a wrinkled piece of ribbon, all you need is a slightly warm light bulb that hasn't been lit for more than five minutes. Simply run the length of the wrinkled ribbon across the top of the warm light bulb until the wrinkles go away, saving you the time of finding your iron and ironing board.

If you don't have enough shoes to justify an over-the-door shoe organizer, you can still buy them for your home because they can pretty much organize anything that is small and can fit in a pocket.

Commonly used for washing and scrubbing dirty dishes, the ubiquitous kitchen sponge can also be used to sprout seeds, loosen wallpaper, remove oil leaks, deodorize your fridge, and more.

If you ever need an emergency finger splint for a broken or sprained finger, use a popsicle stick. Wrap medical tape around your broken finger to the side of a popsicle stick until you can receive proper medical attention.

Need to get a painful splinter out of your skin? Apply some bacon grease onto the affected area and place a band-aid on it overnight. The bacon grease will soften the skin tissue and draw out the splinter, making it easier to remove with tweezers the next day.

Do you have a lot of stagnant energy in your life right now? Maybe all you need to do is check to make sure the drains are working properly in your kitchen and bathroom. Or place a small fish tank somewhere in your home to attract more wealth and prosperity.

Using an empty Gatorade bottle, empty 5 oz. food container, power drill, string, and some red nail polish, you can easily construct your own DIY hummingbird feeder in less than 10 minutes to attract hummingbirds to your own backyard garden.

A long summer road trip brings opportunity for adventure, but also increases the chances for minor disasters including backseats that smell like stale French fries, getting lost in unfamiliar roads, and getting unexpectedly carsick.

Most bouts of hiccups tend to go away on their own, but every so often there's that stubborn hiccuping fit that seems to last for hours. In these cases, you have to get creative and nip them in the bud by trying a few simple home remedies.

Next time you go to the beach, stash a bottle of baby powder in your beach tote—even if you're not planning on changing any diapers. Before you head back home, dust your hands and feet with baby powder to remove sand particles quickly and easily, so you don't track any into your car or home.

If you don't have the backyard space to make a Japanese rock garden where you can spend long afternoons meditatively raking ripple-like patterns into the sand below your feet, settle for the next best thing by making a simple, miniature zen garden that can easily fit on the corner of your desk or nightstand.

Is your beloved silver bracelet looking a little worn? Stick it in a bowl of tomato ketchup to remove the tarnish. The acid in the tomatoes oxidizes with tarnished silver, which helps make your silver items look newer than ever before.

Originally invented by the Shaker community in the 1700s, clothespins are incredibly useful for hanging wet clothing on a clothesline, but also can be used to organize your cable cords, keep your pair of socks together, hold down the used end of your toothpaste tube, and decrease the possibility of you accidentally hammering your finger while pounding down on a nail.

To decrease the possibility of breaking your glass dinner plates while moving into a new home, stack them vertically inside a box like vinyl records instead of horizontally like a stack of pancakes.

Combine your passion for drinking soda and growing your own vegetables by making an upside-down tomato planter! This gardening project is especially great for people who have limited space for growing their own green things. To make this, you'll be using an empty soda bottle, aluminum foil, masking tape, twine, potting soil, and other simple materials.

A lukewarm can of soda placed in a refrigerator can take about 45 minutes to chill. On the other hand, a lukewarm can of soda placed in a bowl of ice, water, and table salt can take less than 5 minutes.

You just ran out of shampoo, but need to give your hair a quick wash. Use baking soda! You can make an emergency shampoo paste from 1 part baking soda, 3 parts water, then work the paste into your hair, allow to sit for a few minutes, and rinse out with warm water.

Cayenne peppers are great for spicing up your bland cooking, but did you know that they can also prevent frostbite? If you ever need to keep your feet warm during a long snow hike or skiing adventure, add a little bit of cayenne pepper powder to the bottom of your socks.

If you want to keep your inner snack monster under control, sniff an apple. Studies have shown that sniffing an apple or a banana helps curve your appetite. Craving something deliciously sweet? Take a whiff of something vanilla-scented, like a vanilla-scented candle.

Eating chili peppers may not be your first idea for cooling down during a hot summer day, but there's a reason why many of the spiciest foods in the world come from places notorious for extremely hot weather. Spicy food makes you sweat without raising your body temperature, and sweating is your body's efficient cooling-down system.

However much you love your summer barbecue parties, you probably won't be going through your entire bag of charcoal briquettes anytime soon. So, take advantage of your charcoal excess by putting them to good use in other ways!

If you've got a couple empty coffee cans getting ready to go out to the recycling—don't get rid of them just yet. Instead, use them to make your own homemade ice cream. It's the perfect DIY treat as the weather gets warmer in anticipation of the summer season.

After you've completely emptied out your coffee can of its coffee beans, put your caffeinated high to good use by getting crafty and productive with the empty vessel that now lies before you.

We all know to should swap out our toothbrushes one every three to four months, but did you know your used Toothbrush still has a number of handy uses once its time in your bathroom is done? You can use an old toothbrush indefinitely to remove silk from corn, exfoliate your lips, tame your unruly eyebrows or clean your cheese grater before sticking it in the dishwasher.

Other than providing a convenient vessel for your carbonated beverages so that they don't go completely flat, aluminum soda cans are also quite useful for a number of other things once they're completely empty.

However much you love cooking fried fish for dinner, there's no need for your kitchen to smell fishy for days afterward. Keep your post-cooking funky kitchen smell to a minimum by boiling cloves in water, simmering lemon peels, oven roasting coffee beans, or leaving bowls of white vinegar on the kitchen counter overnight.

It'd be a financial burden to have to buy new shoes every time a current pair gets scuffed up, but thankfully there are some easy DIY tricks for saving us that trip to the shoe store. Scuff marks can easily be remove from shoes and sneakers using common household items found in your medicine cabinet or in your desk.

Originally invented by American mechanic Walter Hunt in 1849, the humble safety pin was first called a "dress pin." It was intended to solve the problem of bent pins and wounded fingers, but that's not all it's good for.

Cottons balls may not be the most exciting bathroom product in the world, but there are some surprisingly useful things you can do with them.

There are over 38 million people who wear contact lenses in the United States, but nearly a quarter of those never replace their contact lens case. If you're one of those folks, you probably have a drawer full of empty, unused lens cases in your home. Start putting them to good use!

Where one sees plastic garbage bags, I see living creatures soaring high in the windy skies—and you can too. The choice is completely yours. But, wouldn't it be nice to spare one trash bag the indignity of holding waste?