Lighting

bucket lightA bucket light makes an easy, durable camping lantern. That’s usually why they’re made. If you want to build a bucket light for camping, scroll down to the bottom of the page.

I use my bucket light for something completely different – photography. Good light for photography is highly dispersed, which means instead of tight and focused it’s wide and scattered. That’s why a cloudy day is better for taking photos than a sunny one.

So here’s my bucket light. It’s very easy to make, it just requires a bucket sized right to your lamp. In my case, my lamp fits best with the 3.5 gallon bucket pictured below.

bucket lamp 3 gallon bucket

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Trash Can

Quick confession: since I live in Canada, nothing’s actually labelled as “5 gallons.” Also, the rumors you’ve heard about Canada are true – everything is in french.5 gallon trash bags

5 gallon trash can FAIL

I’ve gone my entire life without ever having an opinion about trash cans until now. We purchased this fancy-pants 5 gallon garbage can (don’t ask me why) and 50 5 gallon garbage bags. And this is what happened.

The bags don’t fit the can! Both are rated at exactly 21 liters so what’s going on!? Well it turns out you need to buy 8 gallon bags for this “5 gallon can.”

This isn’t the only problem we had with this 20$ can – which cost 20$ too much by the way. Since it’s wider on top than on bottom, every time we closed the door it fell over and spilled garbage all over the area underneath our sink. Thanks for that, Rubbermaid. Continue reading

Ottoman

Not only does an ottoman make sitting in an easy chair even more comfortable than it already is, but there’s some evidence to suggest that straightening out your body by using an ottoman may actually be better for your health than just sitting regularly.

We should probably start off with some of the beautiful bucket ottomans from around the web before I depress you with my own attempt. But part of living the bucket lifestyle is function before form, after all. Way before form, sometimes.

bucket ottomans

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Grain Grinder

nutrimill grinderPreviously we’ve shared the 5 gallon grain thresher, which separates – literally – the wheat from the chaff.

But naturally you’ll want to grind that raw wheat up into flour, right?

This is the Nutrigrain grinder, which works with the optional bagger to bag flour neatly into a 5 gallon bucket.

If you’ve ever ground your own flour you know how much of a mess it creates. One misplaced breath will cover you and your kitchen with a fine coating of white dust.

This flour bagger was created to solve that most irritating problem.

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