We’ve recently moved into an apartment without a medicine cabinet, so we had to find a place for our bathroom accessories. Over the last week my girlfriend’s things have spead over the counter like mold in a petri dish. If you look closely, you’ll notice my items efficiently stored out of the way in a neat handled bucket.
Here is the actual workstation I use to bring you fresh weeklyish five gallon ideas. 
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Here’s a portable wine rack I put together for a camping trip.
The cardboard frame is from an actual wine box, with three of the slots cut off to fit snugly in the bucket. Buckets are superior to boxes for camping trips because they are waterproof and come with a built-in handle! You could even float one behind you on a river journey like we did in the portable cooler article. Continue reading
It won’t pass coast guard standards, but a sealed up five gallon bucket makes a passable flotation device in a pinch.
Here’s a kid learning to swim using a personal flotation bucket.
You could expand this idea to make a buoy or a raft. One man took this idea to the extreme by building his own private island held afloat by plastic containers.
The pacific northwest monsoon season is arriving in my neighborhood. I use the term “neighborhood” loosely, as I’m spending a few weeks living on a sailboat.
Life on the water finds even more uses for buckets than life on shore. On rainy days, just a few catch enough water to meet all my drinking and cooking needs. The water is delicious and clear, unlike our municipal source which has a faint yellow sediment tint this time of year.
The only filter I need is an old t-shirt tied over-top one of the buckets. Its main function is to filter out sand, which is ubiquitous on the boat. In my system, the two open buckets are poured manually into the filter bucket when I need water.
The rains here are aggressive enough that I don’t need a panel to collect enough water, but if I used a clean tarp to increase my collection surface I would have enough water to start a water bottling company! What would you pay for a bottle of fresh, pure, five gallon bucket water?