Clean Up Your Life With These 10 Brilliantly Simple Hacks
#1 Vinegar + baking soda = super clean diswasher
When you run your next load of dishes, place a (dishwasher safe!) cup of white vinegar on the top rack and add baking soda to the bottom rack and door. Run the dishwasher (use detergent like normal), and the combination will not only help the dishes get clean, but the dishwasher itself will be clean as well!
#2 Vinegar + baking soda = awesome
It was awesome when you made volcanoes with it as a kid, and it’s also awesome for more practical purposes. The classic acid/base reaction can be used to clean tons of things around your house, plus it’s safe and cheap.
#3 Clean Wooden or Bamboo cutting boards with lemon and salt
Lemons are your friend, too! Sprinkle wooden boards down coarse salt and run with a cut lemon. Rinse without soap and dry.
#4 Lemons for hard water stains
The acid in lemon juice dissolves the calcium that leaves the spotty hard water stains. If it’s a really tough one, you can add salt to the lemon and rub with that.
#5 Ammonia cleans an oven just by being ammonia
Make sure your oven is completely cold before trying this one, okay? Close half a cup of ammonia in a bowl in your oven overnight and the fumes will loosen the gunk so that you can simply wipe it down the next day.
#6 Use foil to clean glass cookware
Just crumple up a piece of foil to remove baked-on crud from glass cookware. The foil will have a surface similar to steel wool, but will be easier on your hands. It’s also a good way to get some use out of foil scraps you can’t reuse.
#7 Chalk for grease stain removal
Before throwing the clothes in the wash, rub grease stains with chalk. The chalk dust will absorb the grease, and then it will all be rinsed away in the wash.
#8 Use Play-Doh to clean up glitter
Simply press onto loose glitter to pick it up. As a bonus, you now have glittery Play-Doh.
#9 Use a squeegee to de-fuzz a carpet
It yanks the hair right out and collects it into easy-to-collect (if kinda gross) clumps.
#10 Clean makeup brushes with baby shampoo
Simply wash, rinse, and blot to see if there’s any makeup remaining. When they’re clean, hang them upside down to dry so water doesn’t collect in the handle
