The Ethos, Part 3: Apply a Threaded Fastener to Proper

This is part 3 of a 5-part series on the fundamentals of being a household hacker.

Paying attention to function over billing automatically lends itself to some unorthodox uses for certain items. For instance, my water-bath canner is actually a standard stock pot and a chrome trivet, because who needs a dedicated canning rack when all you're really looking for is a way to keep the jars off the bottom so they don't knock around in the boiling water. Before I got the trivet, I made individual jar cradles out of aluminum foil. Such things may not be the accepted way of going about it (although a few quick internet searches show I'm not the only one doing them), but they work. Working trumps proper.

Propriety does not always mesh with the everyday needs of the household. My domestic sphere does not have a dining room table. I love to cook, and take pride in preparing meals from scratch. The house even has a lovely eat-in kitchen with a sliding glass door and view of the back. Still, we decided that we are just not the dining room table kind of household. Any horizontal surface in the house is almost instantly populated with clutter and paperwork, so the odds of ever being able to eat at a dining table were not in our favor. For the record, we eat in the living room, where we also do not have a coffee table. We're just not a big table household, and that works for us. Drove my co-geek's mother about nuts though.

The notable exception to the “screw proper” ethos involves building codes. Household Hacks in no way condones thumbing one's nose at building codes. In that case, proper reigns