Life, as you know by now, is messy.
Not just in the jobs, relationships, and financial arenas; life is also literally messy. Over the years, clever homemakers and chemists have stumbled upon ingenious, efficient ways of getting things clean. Here are some of the best:
Meet oxygenated cleaners
When it comes to clothing stains made from organic material—grass, ketchup, blood, pet stains, juice, coffee, and so on—you should know about oxygenated cleaners (sometimes called oxygen bleach). These products, with names like OxiClean, Sun Oxygen Cleaner, and Biokleen Oxygen Bleach, release tiny oxygen bubbles that eat up organic stains and odors from fabric or carpet, and they’re surprisingly effective. They’re also nontoxic and better for the environment than bleach or ammonia.
You can also make your own oxygen-based cleaner to save a little money. You can find instructions online, but here’s the basic recipe: You mix one part baking soda, one part hydrogen peroxide, and two parts water.
In the following tips, you’ll see references to oxygen bleach; now you know what it is. (One more tip: Follow instructions. Using too much can destroy the fabric, which is even more embarrassing than just wearing grass stains.)
Removing red-wine stains
The key to getting wine stains out of your clothes is, once again, cold water. Submerge the fabric in ice-cold water for a long time: eight hours or overnight, if possible.
That should do it. But if a faint pink stain remains, soak the spot in the usual oxygenated cleaner bath: a tablespoon of oxygenated cleaner (here) dissolved in two cups of very hot water. In 15 minutes, the stain will be gone. You’re welcome.
57 varieties of ketchup—1 way to remove it
So a blob of ketchup escaped your burger and landed on your shirt. Welcome to the club.
Grab a spoon or butter knife, and scrape off as much of the ketchup as you can.
Now hold the back of the fabric under a strong stream of cold water—the idea is to force out as much of the stuff as possible. (Yes, this generally means taking the clothing off.)
If there’s any ketchupy stain left on the front, rinse it off; you’ll have to call in chemical reinforcements. Immerse the stain in a solution: two cups of very hot water, one tablespoon of a powdered oxygenated cleaner (previous tip). The stain disappears, usually within an hour.
How to get blood out of fabric
If you get blood on your clothing, furniture, or rug, the most important message is this: Rinse with cold water while it’s still wet. Blood is a lot harder to get out once it has dried. (That’s why you don’t use hot water, which will help the blood set.)
A small army of devotees online swear that your own saliva is great for dissolving a fresh blood spot, too. (They murmur something about enzymes in your spit, but enzymes don’t dissolve protein, so it must be some other effect.)
If the blood has already dried, soak in cold water first. You’ll then probably need an extra hand by rubbing with either hydrogen peroxide on a cotton ball (both available at the drugstore) or, in a pinch, a paste of salt and water.
How to remove hideous, unsightly candle wax
Maybe you left your candles burning too long. Maybe you were making batik or tie-dye and spilled some wax. Or you were waxing your snowboard and got it all over.
In any case, wax sometimes lands in places it shouldn’t—such as the candleholder, the tablecloth, or the table itself. Here’s your complete guide to removing wax:
• Wax on the candlestick. You can either pick away at it futilely with your fingernails—or you can pop the thing into the freezer for 20 minutes.
At that point, you can snap the wax right off. If there’s any residue left, dip the candlestick in boiling water to melt it away.
• Wax on fabric or rug. Cover the spilled wax with part of a brown paper bag, paper towel, or a black-and-white newspaper page.
Now set a clothing iron to medium, and iron the spot through the paper. The wax will melt and stick to the paper, lifting it right off.
Don’t use steam, and don’t iron a living thing, like a person.
If the wax is on something plastic, set the iron to very low heat—or just use a blow-dryer instead.
• Wax on a wooden table. Put an ice cube into a plastic bag, and hold it against the blob until the wax is hard and brittle. Now you can scrape it away with a credit card; finish up with your regularly scheduled furniture polish.
Make your hands stop stinking
After you’ve cut or handled onions or garlic, you may notice that your hands smell like onions or garlic. (Shocker!) Doesn’t seem to matter how many times you wash them.
The trick is to rub them with toothpaste. Not only will you eradicate the onion/garlic smell, but your hands will have fresh breath and fewer cavities.
Freeze it.
Seriously, that’s it. Once you’ve frozen the garment (and the gum), the gum pops right off.
The stainless-steel baby-oil trick
The stainless-steel baby-oil trick goes like this: Use baby oil to clean and polish stainless steel: ovens, refrigerators, stoves, and so on. It costs a lot less than stainless-steel polish, and it works like—well, like baby oil on stainless steel.
Dry-erase marker can erase permanent marker
So some idiot drew on your dry-erase whiteboard with a permanent marker?
No problem. Dry-erase marker ink contains a strong solvent. If someone drew with a Sharpie on your whiteboard, carefully draw over it with a dry-erase marker. Then, while the ink is still fresh, erase it as usual, with the dry-erase eraser. (Repeat if necessary.)
Believe it or not, that’s the best, quickest way to remove “permanent” ink.
The trick to removing white heat marks and water rings
Guests, you know? Can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot ’em.
They put hot dishes on wooden furniture and leave whitish heat marks. They set wet glasses onto bare wood and leave water rings.
Here’s how you clean up after them:
• Heat marks. With a paper towel or soft cloth, rub a dab of mayonnaise into the wood. Use a circular motion, then wipe clean.
• Water rings. Believe it or not, the same mayo trick works on water rings. Small dab, rub around, wipe clean.
Coming soon: Hellmann’s Real Furniture Polish.
It’s amazing how often you can find someone in the world willing to pay money for junk you’re about to throw away. As you clean out your garage/attic/closet, remember that Craigslist and eBay are your friends.
If you don’t have time to deal with potential buyers, and you’re just happy to have someone haul your stuff away, check out Freecycle.org.
Freecycle is “a nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills.”
It’s a place to list stuff you just want to be rid of—or to look over stuff other people are trying to get rid of. Baby stuff, ski stuff, furniture, books, file cabinets, video games, and on and on.
And if it’s electronics you want to unload—a phone, tablet, or laptop, for example—you want to contact a site like Gazelle.com. These outfits buy used old gadgets. Even with a cracked screen, that old iPhone is probably worth something.
Rubbing alcohol cleans permanent marker
Permanent-marker marks—on clothes, furniture, walls, metal, plastic, ceramic, and skin—aren’t actually so permanent. Rubbing alcohol gets them off like magic.
The best bet is 90 percent isopropyl alcohol. (Most rubbing alcohol is actually 70 percent, which takes longer to evaporate.) Ethanol works, too. Even vodka if you’re desperate. Or Purell (alcohol hand sanitizer) if you’re really desperate.
Those magic juices also get tree sap off your skin, by the way.
Bottom line: In the battle of Sharpie vs. Purell, alcohol wins.
How to clean a microwave
Put a microwave-safe bowl half full of water in your microwave; turn it on high for five minutes; wipe with a paper towel.
That’s how you steam-blast the oven’s walls to loosen up caked-on exploded food, like spaghetti sauce. (Some people advise adding a little vinegar, lemon juice, or baking soda—but the truth is, water alone works just fine.)
The right two ways to wash windows
First of all, wash your windows on an overcast day. On a sunny day, they dry so fast that they leave streaks.
Second: Use vertical strokes on the outside of the glass, and horizontal ones on the inside. That way, you can tell which side has smudges that you’ve missed.
You read it here first, folks.
How to recycle unrecyclable stuff
The earth’s human population keeps growing, and it keeps buying stuff and throwing it away. No wonder more and more towns are getting serious about offering recycling programs.
• Glass, metal, and paper. These are the easy ones. All big cities, and most towns, let you recycle this stuff. Some even offer single-source recycling, which means you can put all of it (glass, metal, paper) into a single bin, without separating it.
• Plastic bags. It’s rare that a city recycling program accepts plastic bags. These bags are fairly sinister, too—they take hundreds of years to decompose, and in that time, a distressing number of them find their way into the oceans, where they choke and kill fish and birds.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t recycle them. When you’re finished with plastic bags, save them up. (For example, you can stuff them into another plastic bag that hangs from a closet doorknob.) When you’ve got enough to be meaningful, take them to a grocery store or other store that recycles plastic bags.
And how do you find the nearest one? By visiting http://abagslife.com/find-a-recycle-center.
• Electronics. Old gadgets are pretty nasty, too. They often contain toxic metals and chemicals that can soak into the water supply. In a typical year, Americans throw about 1.8 million tons of electronics into the country’s landfills.
Recycling them lets manufacturers reuse their expensive components, which saves a vast amount of energy and raw materials. A million cell phones contain 35,000 pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold, and 33 pounds of palladium.
Here again, it’s not hard to give your ancient gizmos a proper sendoff. If your junk is too old to resell, you can drop it off at any Best Buy, Target, or Radio Shack. All three chains accept and recycle old computers, GPS units, TVs, printers, monitors, cables, cell phones, remotes, headphones, and so on. Often, you’ll even get an instant discount on a new purchase or a gift card. How’s that for a win-win?