One of the most unexpected work at home successes I came across was a co-worker whose husband was a Star Wars fanatic. He started collected the action figures and then eventually selling a few, then buying in bulk and selling at high price later. He ended up quitting his programming job and went fulltime collecting and reselling. He either recognized what would eventually become popular and bought it in bulk when it came out, or found others selling items much below niche market prices. He also expanded beyond just Star Wars but used his knowledge of the collector field to make good buys and resell on eBay for a good profit.
We have a friend who is expert in quilting. So good that she does a lot of work just finishing other quilters projects. I imagine that could be done for other things such as sewing, knitting and crocheting but a large project such as a quilt can bring in a few hundred bucks in one project. Can there ever be too many individualized baby quilts? Not just with embroidered names but by the fabric selected. In fact, some ladies are no doing good internet business just selling sets of fabric squares to make quilts; preselected fabric for various color schemes and themes. My wife does this herself selecting fabric with teddy bear pilot theme (Air Force baby so some fabric is blue and white like clouds, small airplane print, etc.), elephants, cats, turtles, cowboys and horses, bears, camo, and on and on. Other ladies are designing fabric for quilting or sewing.
Can you fix things? Seems to be an endless need to repair stuff, at least that which can be repaired. Older sewing machines is another guys business. Also people will pay top dollar for unique things that are made from notable local materials, or are customized in some fashion. I've known people that make fishing flies (ENDLESS variety and opinion), fishing lures, custom/traditional bows, strings, arrow spines and vanes, stone arrow heads even.
For several years one of my daughters worked for a company that has a contract with a state for doing in home child assessments. I think this was for like welfare and special needs or something. They hired people to do the home visits but they also needed a couple of people to clean up their reports into the format the state requires. She worked totally at home, even wrote a training manual for the field evaluators on writing good reports, and devised a spreadsheet to collect the coded data and turn it into correct narrative. There are only a few companies that have contracts with the state but might be something to consider.
