What's something fun or useful you discovered about something you once disregarded as useless?

[DragonEye]

I bought my current laptop a while ago, but in typical depressed acoustic fashion, I never got around to throwing out the box it came in. I recently decided I was going to buckle down and clean my room, and today's tasks included breaking down a bunch of cardboard boxes that have been sitting in my room collecting dust. As I was trying to figure out how to go about breaking down the box my laptop came in, I noticed some intructions on the inside of the lid of the box. After looking through them and finagling with the box a bit, I discovered that the part with the instructions was a separate piece of card board that was only connected to the box on one side, the rest secured by tabs in slots. So I followed the instructions, cutting the one side of the cardboard that was fully connected, folding the now separated piece according to the instructions, and wound up making a little stand that props up the back of my laptop! It not only puts my keyboard at an angle that makes it more comfortable to use, but it lifts up the part of my laptop that has the vent that the fans blow out of, which should help to keep my laptop from overheating as easily. And to think I was going to throw this into the recycling with the rest of the box! What have you discovered about things you were going to throw away that made them more useful?

Spoiler:

 

[RadEmpoleon]

There have been a few times where I bought materials for projects that I didn't end up using, but used for something completely different. I bought 2 skeins of white yarn to make pompoms, but they just didn't turn out any good so I gave up. Granted the yarn was from the dollar store, but I didn't want it to go to waste. I've actually used that same yarn for 2 different school projects.

 

[Lavemu💛]

Got a blanket for christmas once, it was wrapped in a cute bow, was gonna throw it away, but i decided to tie it around the fan in my room uwu

Spoiler:

 

[Setsuna]

I'm not entirely sure if this fits, but late last year I tried to form the habit of putting everything on an actual calendar and set reminders for myself instead of just trying to keep it all in my head. When I was younger I didn't really like having a calendar or a school planner or something like that because I just thought it was annoying having to constantly write something and keep track of it all, but syncing a digital calendar through my computer/phone has really helped me, and colour-coding and setting weekly things to repeat has helped that a lot, I enjoy using it now and put extra notes in planned events sometimes.