There, I Fixed is a blog that features a range of repairs accomplished with on-the-fly amateur engineering. It’s amazing what can be achieved with duct tape, cable ties, wire and other found objects without a single trip to hardware store!  (Noted: the biggest word in the site’s tag cloud appears to be “unsafe!”)

We particularly love this ugly but effective solution for hot water delivery:

Upon further investigation, we learn via neatorama that this DIY water heater was made by Patryk Sielski from Warsaw, Poland. Patryk wrote:

I live in an academic hostel of Warsaw University of Technology. Unfortunately, we don’t have hot water in our rooms, it’s only in kitchen and toilet outside. This inconvenience caused me to think about hot water. Commercial heaters are to expensive to students, it’s also a problem to assemble without temporary cutting off the water. Beside of that, the fuses would be immediately blown.

The cheapest device that have an electric heater is a cordless kettle. Some glue, a bottle and a pipe… voila! The hot water flows.

Also, here’s a guerrilla plumbing solution that will stop that leak without a single cent spent at Home Depot:

And using the very versatile vice-grip pliers, this faucet is back in service in seconds:

Confession: my house is filled with on-the-fly fixes, and here’s one of them: this old outdoor faucet has an annoying drip-drip-drip when the water’s on, soaking directly into the foundation. I took care of it quick with this orange-juice-carton splash guard. This was much easier than disassembling the faucet and attempting to ID and replace the worn part/s. But I’m going to do that very soon. Really.