Various household and other hints

Okay, so I was going to write a nice, solid PF piece with a fine political spin, but…it’s 110+ out there, I’ve run all over town, now have a couple of margaritas under my belt, and about all I’m up for is editing a detective novel (if that) and nattering on here. And hereabouts, about the best I can come up with is a few handy household hints.

Get gunk off wooden surfaces with mineral oil

The cheapest mineral oil in the world is to be had at Ikea. They call it Skydd; I call it Skkwsh.

Mineral oil (or baby oil, which is the same thing, but don’t put either of them on your baby) works miracles on soiled wood. Some people use it to polish furniture with oil finish; I personally don’t care much for that use, because it leaves an ever-so-slightly tacky film. However, it is the business for cleaning sticky stuff off utilitarian pieces of furniture and kitchen grease off the ledges and crannies of your kitchen cabinets.

This noon I made a run on Costco (’nother hint: never do that on Saturday!), where I finally brought myself to buy a folding table to hold the semi-permanent garage junk that has needed a home for a long time. Among other things, since time immemorial the shredder and the crockpot have each been perched on separate vintage cheap-wooden folding TV tables. Many’s the time I’ve thought that if I just had one of those large, cheapo work tables churches and schools always seem to have on hand, it could hold those two items plus a great deal of other in-the-way junk, and even more in-the-way junk could be stowed beneath it.

Bringing this object—the folding utility table—into the garage liberated the two ancient TV tables. I brought them into the kitchen to clean them, it being way too hot in the garage for anything resembling physical work. They each had some sort of black greasy gunk, presumably well-aged drips from the crockpot seasoned with dust-storm residue.  Wiping them off with a wet paper towel did nothing to dislodge the black greasy spots.

But: rubbing a little mineral oil into the top of the table, letting it sit for a minute, and then wiping it vigorously off removed the stuff without a whimper. Cut about 15 years off the crotchety old tables’ apparent age, too. Sure would be nice if the gunk would have the same effect on the aged human face.

Don’t even think of trying that. It’s toxic.

Moving on…

Store household cleaners in plastic tubs…and be smart about it!

Said garage is lined with storage cabinets, and one of the shelves of said storage cabinets holds my various lifetime supplies of household chemicals. Among those chemicals one could find a couple of bottles of ammonia, which I use to make a DIY version of Windex glass cleaner.

I keep these things, for convenience, in small plastic bins, the sort of things that used to be sold as dishwashing pans. They make it possible to slide out a whole slew of bottles and cans, rather than having to stick my head into the cabinet and shuffle through a bunch of containers in the dark

Welp, turns out this habit has another benefit: if one of those containers leaks, the plastic bin collects and contains the liquid, keeping it from creating a gawdawful mess all over your cabinetry!

Yesterday afternoon preparatory to washing the Arcadia doors, I pulled out a bottle of ammonia, therewith to whip up some more glass & tile cleaner…only to have it splash on my bare feet! The damn plastic bottle had developed a leak!

Pulled out the plastic bin, hauled out and rinsed its contents. Godlmighty but in there were not one but two unopened bottles of Clorox toilet cleaner, a substance liberally laced with chlorine bleach. As we know,

ammonia + chlorine bleach = death.

Mercifully, the toilet-cleaner plastic bottles were not breached. I carried them into the backyard anyway.And the particleboard shelves were unruined—they would have been trashed if ammonia had been quietly dripping onto them for God only knows how long. So:

Item: Storing bottles of household chemicals in plastic bins is a good idea. But…

Item: Do not store products that contain bleach in the same plastic bin with products that contain ammonia!

Get gunk off tile grout

Satan and Proserpine, previous owners of the Funny Farm, laid a bunch of tiles down in the living room, hall, kitchen, and dining room, all by their little selves. My tile dude said they did a good job of it, but like moi was mystified at the reason for their having slathered the grout with off-white “sealer” that really is nothing more than a type of latex paint.

Now…what happens to white grout over time?

Yeah. It collects dirt and turns…well, dirt-colored.

Same thing happens to fake white grout created by painting real grout with latex “sealer”: over time, the joints in S & P’s tiles (hm. Hadn’t thought of that confluence. Was the latest market crash and rape of the Baby Boom’s savings caused by Satan and Proserpine themselves?) …Yes, the joints in the tiles had become grody, to put it kindly. Yesterday with Pup out of my hair and all of next semester’s courses designed and posted online, I took it upon myself to do some serious cleaning.

What should I find when I emptied out the plastic bin into which a bottle of ammonia had slowly been leaking but a box of Mr. Clean Magic Eraser wall cleaner knockoffs from Target!

Recalling that these strange chemical sponges do a great job of cleaning the grout between Mexican tiles on the countertop, I decided to try them on the fake grout paint stuff on the floor.

Amazing!

It made a huge difference: so huge that where I accidentally  missed a line of grout, it jumps right out at me. The tiles look almost as bright and clean as they did when I moved in here, shortly after those two painted the stuff on all the grout in the house.

The box contained four pieces of the stuff, which dissolves annoyingly as you scrub with it. These cleaned the kitchen, dining room, and the endless hall floors. Next weekend I’ll have to buy another box of the stuff from Tar-Zhay and do the living room. Very, very effective.

Make magnetic fridge notepad and pencil

You’ve seen those cutesie magnetized notepads with stick-to-the-fridge coordinating pencils and ballpoints? Of course, being a little funny about money yourself, you’re too cheap to spend the stupid amounts of money these pieces of kitsch cost, even though you can imagine the handiness of having a pad of paper hanging from the refrigerator, there to post stuff you’ve run out of.

Well, cheap yourself out of these things no longer!

First, get yourself an old-fashioned yellow pencil, the kind that’s milled with six flat sides. Cut off a two-inch-long (or so) strip of rubbery stuff the width of one of these sides. Remove the protective backing and stick it onto the pencil, just below the eraser.

Voilà! Now you have a pencil that will stick on the fridge. And I suppose you see the rest of this coming, eh?

Now get yourself a small yellow pad, 5 x 8 inches. These are available in lifetime supplies at my favorite purveyor of middle-class goods, Costco.

At any good craft store (such as Michael’s or even…yes! Home Depot) you can find magnetized sheets of bendy rubbery stuff, which you can cut with scissors.

The rubbery stuff has a stick-on backing, which is and is not sufficient for our purposes.

Cut off several more fairly large pieces of rubberized stuff, so that you can glue at least a couple on the cardboard backside of the yellow pad. It will probably take more than one. Depending on the brand of magnetic rubbery stuff, I’ve had it take two or three pieces to hold up a mini-yellow pad.

Do not buy a lifetime supply of magnetic rubbery stuff! It’s ridiculously easy to reuse this stuff. When you run out of paper, or when you’ve sharpened your pencil down to where its magnetic holder resides, simply pull off the rubbery stuff and glue it, using some Elmer’s or carpenter’s glue, onto a new pencil or pad. It lasts forever.

And there you are: A kewl yellow pad and pencil, hanging at your disposal on the fridge at all times!

 

Out and About on the Web

And if you’ve done all these things and still find yourself at loose ends, pass some time at a few friends’ websites:

Okay, this is one you have to follow. First, Mrs. Accountability flies into a tit when she discovers Wells Fargo is about to start gouging her for the privilege of using her money to make a profit. Like any sane PF consumer, she decides it’s time to find someplace else to do her banking. Then she realizes what’s involved in this venture and makes an executive decision.

Guess I’m not the only one who loved (or at least got excited about) this post from Nicole and Maggie at Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured on passing judgment about other people based on their personal pastimes. It’s a great post, and the comments come up to the same standard. Hm. You know, I think this may be one of the truly great personal blogs out there, right up there with Donna Freedman’s Surviving and Thriving.

Speaking of the which, I don’t know how that woman manages to say so much in so few words.

Frugal Scholar’s post on the counterproductiveness of saving is well said.

In the earning, planning, and saving department, Evan has a few well-placed observations over at My Journey to Millions.

And along those lines, FMF offers some really startling insights at Free Money Finance. This is quite a piece of writing. If you’re still in your earning years, you need to read it. If you’re not but have children or friends who are, pass it along.

But in the same department, SVB over at Silicon Valley Blog brings up an entirely new set of questions about planning for lifetime savings and retirement.

Money Beagle contemplates the value of an insurance agent.

Afford Anything remarks on the spreading tendency to install valet parking…everywhere!

Onward!

Image (other than Funny’s): “All is Vanity” by C. Allan Gilbert. Life, death, and meaning of existence are intertwined. (Woman gazing into boudoir mirror forms shape of skull.) Public Domain.