Maybe it’s just me, but I find great joy in solving very specific problems with equally specific, bespoke solutions. It’s usually something around the house or part of my daily routine; a small irritation that’s not worth thinking about initially. But over several years the annoyance accumulates until one day something in me snaps, and I bring my problem-solving inclinations to bear.

Here are some of my custom solutions.

Pot lid holder

I have a pot lid that I use with several pieces of cookware, so it was often hanging around the kitchen benchtops with nowhere to go. I already had two IKEA Kungsfors racks for hanging pots and pans, why not hang the lid too? So I designed and 3D-printed this:

A pot lid suspended from a rack via a 3D-printed hook. The rack also holds other pots and pans.

The design lets it hang low enough that I can reach it easily, and keeps it oriented vertically so it fits alongside the frying pans. Like the rest of the Kungsfors hooks, it clips on firmly so I won’t knock the whole thing off the rack while trying to put the lid on the hook.

Oil/wine/heat mats/kitchen scales organiser

Speaking of things that just hang around the kitchen wherever: here’s something I built to accommodate these items.

A wooden caddy for cooking oils, red wine, cork heat mats and kitchen scales

Soundbar controls guard

My cats kept walking across the soundbar and activating random touch controls, putting it into weird states. My tactic of yelling and gesticulating at them to get off wasn’t paying dividends, so I designed this discreet 3D-printed cover for the controls.

A sleek black cover over the controls of a soundbar

Train notifier

For a while in 2024, my morning train was frequently getting cancelled, and I wouldn’t realise until I got to the station. I could use any of the Sydney train apps to check it before leaving home, but who’s going to bother doing that every morning?

So my frustration led to me creating Sydney train disruption notifier. Each morning it uses the Transport for NSW APIs to check the specific train I catch, and sends me a notification with its status: on time, late, or cancelled.

A notification on my Garmin smartwatch, stating that my train has been cancelled

(Annoyingly, since I built this my train hardly ever gets cancelled.)

Robot vacuum helpers

My robot vacuum cleaner was having trouble getting into the bathroom due to 3-centimetre step up from the hallway floor to the bathroom tiles. So I built this little ramp:

A small ramp between two floor surfaces

It was also attempting to drive over the base of my IKEA Poäng chair and getting stuck. The solution is to raise the chair by about 7mm, which is enough that the vacuum will consider it an obstacle and go around it. There are 3D-printable solutions for this online, but at the time I didn’t have a 3D printer so instead I cut out strips of plywood to go under the base.

The base of an IKEA Poäng chair, with a layer of plywood discreetly attached underneath

What is it that makes this sort of thing so joyful? Partly it’s the knowledge that an annoyance has been banished from my life. And partly it’s the inherent gratification that all engineering types get from solving problems, but amplified by being the weirdly-shaped solution to match a weirdly-shaped problem, fitting together like a hand in a glove.

But there’s a third thing going on here, which is that hyper-specific solutions are funny.

There are a couple of important factors that go into humour: unexpectedness, and specificity. Resorting to CAD programs and additive manufacturing to solve the problem of where to put a pot lid fits both those criteria, as does getting so miffed about a cancelled train that you spend hours writing a piece of software.

So the next time something mildly irritates you, take a moment to think: what’s the funniest way I could solve this?