Household tips and tricks! - Are you having trouble getting the wine stains out of your carpet? Do you clean your cookware with something extraordinary? Come share!

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𝕺𝖑' 𝕯𝖎𝖗𝖙𝖞 𝕱𝖆𝖙𝖘𝖔 said:
Swiffer the kitchen floor while waiting for kettle to boil or tendies to microwave
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Not a big fan of the Swiffer. Those things leave behind so much sticky residue. I have a steam cleaner. In fact, I steam-cleaned all of the Swiffer residue from my mom's ceramic tile floor and it took several passes. Also, the dry Swiffer cloths for dusting just attract more dust. Microfiber cloths work well for that.
 
TrainWreckSpotter said:
Not a big fan of the Swiffer. Those things leave behind so much sticky residue. I have a steam cleaner. In fact, I steam-cleaned all of the Swiffer residue from my mom's ceramic tile floor and it took several passes. Also, the dry Swiffer cloths for dusting just attract more dust. Microfiber cloths work well for that.
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Steam mops are fun to use (at least for me) and effective at sanitizing as well. I recommend investing in a good spin mop too. They’re great for doors/walls/baseboards, not just floors. Little splash of Lysol or whatever and some boiling water is all you need.
 
Haliaeetus Vocifer said:
Steam mops are fun to use (at least for me) and effective at sanitizing as well. I recommend investing in a good spin mop too. They’re great for doors/walls/baseboards, not just floors. Little splash of Lysol or whatever and some boiling water is all you need.
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I also have a Libman microfiber dry mop. It's excellent for dusting hardwood floors, baseboards, ceiling corners, and especially under beds.

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I posted this elsewhere but I'll repeat it here:

Forgot about leftovers and they're moldy and stinky and awful, in your nice reusable storage container that you don't want to throw out? Freeze them overnight, briefly run warm water over the container and pop the leftovers out like a gross Popsicle. Ideally do this right before you take out the trash, or right into the compost if appropriate.

This is a quality of life upgrade more than anything; you'd clean it out anyway, but this makes it less unpleasant.
 
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"A lightbulb over a bowl of soap water" And to think the number of times I've used a flashlight to lure a fly out of a room at night, I've never put two and two together....
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Really hate fruitflies. The only other time I dealt with an infestation like this one I eventually discovered a bag of fertilizer that had been left open that they were breeding in which took care of the issue once I threw it out. I can't figure out where they're coming from this time. The best home remedy trap I've found is red wine vinegar with some dish soap, but I finally broke down and bought traps at the hardware store. I don't think the liquid in them is anything special but the design seems better than my open dishes of liquid so hopefully this works.
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There She Glows said:
Really hate fruitflies. The only other time I dealt with an infestation like this one I eventually discovered a bag of fertilizer that had been left open that they were breeding in which took care of the issue once I threw it out. I can't figure out where they're coming from this time. The best home remedy trap I've found is red wine vinegar with some dish soap, but I finally broke down and bought traps at the hardware store. I don't think the liquid in them is anything special but the design seems better than my open dishes of liquid so hopefully this works.
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You can DIY something similar by cutting off the top of a bottle of water and inverting it over the bottom part. The point is to have a smaller entrance/exit. They're attracted to the bait, but then can't find their way out again. I add sticky traps standing up to the back of these when we get the occasional outbreak, just to catch even more.
 
There She Glows said:
I don't think the liquid in them is anything special but the design seems better than my open dishes of liquid so hopefully this works.
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Commercial fruit fly bait is just a powdered version of the usual stuff you'd mix up; I refill fruit fly traps with white wine+dish soap all the time and have no problems. The commercial baits I've seen (that come free with traps) are usually attractants, sometimes surfactants, and the only unusual thing is sometimes they have a meat scent as well as the rotting fruit scent.

Chub Rub said:
You can DIY something similar by cutting off the top of a bottle of water and inverting it over the bottom part.
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In my experience, DIY fruit fly traps work just as well as purchased ones and are easy to make and no guilt for throwing away.

There are only two potential drawbacks to DIY fruit fly traps: sometimes they look shitty enough to make you feel bad about your kitchen.

More importantly: if the DIY fly trap is big, kludged together and made of light materials, you may end up with dead fly cocktail dried all over your counter because it turns out your cat thinks that "don't get on the counter" only applies when the human is awake. Or you bump it yourself, or the people you live with don't give enough of a crap. It's easy to knock over the inverted-bottle trap, and now you have to clean up a gross mess while you're already annoyed at having an infestation.

If you don't care for the plastic reusable traps, or you want to get it out of the danger zone on the counter, I really like the old-fashioned glass fruit fly traps:
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They have a funnel-hole in the bottom for the flies to fly into, and little bumps on the bottom so you can set it on a flat surface, but I've had them work even better in the window where the light is also an enticement. You can also hang them right next to a hanging plant, if the plant is part of the problem.
 
NOT Sword Fighter Super said:
Just found out Dawn Powerwash will pretty much kill ants on contact. Just make sure you cover them completely in the foam.
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Dish soap and water in a spray bottle will kill basically everything.

They do die a horrible suffocating death through, I guess. Insects "breathe" through their exoskeletons and you're basically clogging them all up.
 
std::string said:
Dish soap and water in a spray bottle will kill basically everything.

They do die a horrible suffocating death through, I guess. Insects "breathe" through their exoskeletons and you're basically clogging them all up.
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I’m sure crushing them would be quicker but I hate doing it.

I guess since they’re covered in foam and I can’t see them it makes me feel less bad about it.
 
I have a heavy cotton jumper with a yellow curry stain, about 1 inch by 1 inch. I've tried everything (dish soap, vinegar, etc) and it's gone lighter but not come out. Is there any last ditch efforts I can try?
 
Aunt Carol said:
If you don't care for the plastic reusable traps, or you want to get it out of the danger zone on the counter, I really like the old-fashioned glass fruit fly traps:
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These are actually charming.

The DIY do look shitty, but I can usually power through the bugs pretty quickly with enough of them so I can throw them out before company comes over again. Our kitchen gets great light and I'm not willing to give up my plants, and the occasional infestation is the price I pay.
 
Tragon Dirtle said:
I have a heavy cotton jumper with a yellow curry stain, about 1 inch by 1 inch. I've tried everything (dish soap, vinegar, etc) and it's gone lighter but not come out. Is there any last ditch efforts I can try?
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Paste made of Oxyclean (bleach powder)?

If it's withstood everything else, it's probably stuck there, alas. Turmeric is one of the things they tell you to use when you naturally dye Easter eggs yellow.

Nuclear option might be to dye the whole thing yellow, or cover the stain with an iron-on transfer of a sick-ass panther.
Chub Rub said:
The DIY do look shitty, but I can usually power through the bugs pretty quickly with enough of them so I can throw them out before company comes over again.
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Houseplants in the kitchen are my thing, too. I'm really not concerned with looks as I am with how tippy an improvised fly trap can be; inverted soda bottle cut in half is just Murphy's Law in action, once you have box wine and dead bugs in the bottom.

I put an extra hook on the hanger one of my plants is using, so when it's Fly Party again I can just hang the glass fly trap right on top of it, and it looks even prettier with the sunlight coming through it.

If you like a standing fly trap instead of a hanging one, there are some even prettier standing fruit fly traps:
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(And the plastic ones that look like apples or pumpkins.)
 
i don't know if this counts as a household tip so much as a general "i had a bad encounter with a bug" tip, but if you get stung by a wasp it helps a lot to put a cold, damp teabag on the area since tannins counteract the venom -- green or black tea works best for this reason.

as for whether this works for bee stings, i can't personally say because the one time i was able to test it out after an encounter with a pissy bumblebee (she probably mistook my black shirt for a bear) it didn't work, but a single incident isn't enough data to prove much of anything.
 
Tragon Dirtle said:
I have a heavy cotton jumper with a yellow curry stain, about 1 inch by 1 inch. I've tried everything (dish soap, vinegar, etc) and it's gone lighter but not come out. Is there any last ditch efforts I can try?
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A scoop of the napisan into a bucket with hot water and soak overnight then throw it in for a hot long wash in the machine, hang it outside on the line to dry
 
Does anyone have any cordless vacuum cleaner recommendations? The one I have now isn't great and id like to upgrade to a Gucci one. I'm willing to spend up to $500 or close enough to that if it's really good. What I don't like about the one I have now is that it has two modes, bare floor mode which I use for the laminate floor and a high speed carpet mode but it switches between them """"intelligently"""" (retardedly) and you can manually set which mode it's in anyway so it's fuckin pointless and annoying for it to randomly change its rev speed.
 
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