The "I'll be damned, it actually works" helpful tip thread

If you get pine sap on your hands try washing your hands with pure peanut butter.

Works like a charm.

Stuff burned on inside the bottom of a cooking pot? It scrapes off amazingly well with the edge of a credit card.

Hang on - if you’ve opened the carton without the broken egg, why wouldn’t you just take that one instead of swapping it over?

Adding Napisan and a stiff brush (or broom) to clean tile grout.

Welcome aboard. I think MPSIMS is the correct forum for new members to introduce themselves.

Sometimes it seems that every carton has at least one broken egg, so swapping out eggs is your quickest solution.

Toothpaste works on mosquito bites, burns, pimples, cleans silver and hazy headlight lamps.
Witch hazel for the scalp and skin.
Is it weird that I use toothpaste as a cleaner but baking soda for toothpaste?

Geez - I didn’t realise that Smash Up Derby was an egg delivery service.

Yup - instead of checking another whole dozen, I just grab a good egg and be on my way.

If there’s too much lime in your water, dump some vinegar in the dishwasher at the start of the cycle – gets rid of that white haze on clear glassware.

I’ll back this one up. It’s a cheap way to put the sparkle back in your glassware.

Vinegar is also a great way to clean a cat’s plastic water tray. Cats often won’t drink water from a dish that may still smell soapy but the vinegar scent breaks down and dissipates quickly. Happy cats = happy me.

Try peanut butter.Just take a spoonful and eat it and no more hiccups. It’s worked on every family member and even on Gunner the Great Dane. He gets them all the tine and a small bit of peanut butter and he’s back to normal.

Next week on How to Train Your Human

If the visor on your helmet is hazy first wet with cold water and apply a mild detergent with your (clean) fingers, rinse carefully and dry with the softest lint-free/microfiber cloth you can find. Don’t use glass cleaner because it is not glass.

With scratches you can use toothpaste to buff them out, but try a small area on a corner you don’t look through first as it could damage the surface.

…and am I the only one that started mentally singing “put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning?” I am? Oh well. :slight_smile:

I ended up with a terrible drain fly infestation in my master bathroom. I tried everything (more or less) including thick “industrial grade” bio-gels and all that other crap. Foaming Pipe Snake didn’t cut it. Manually scraping the gunk didn’t cut it. Bleach didn’t cut it.

When they went into hibernation I started treating each drain with a ~1:1 mixture of baking soda and white vinegar. I dumped the baking soda in first, then added the vinegar. This foamed violently, coating the entire area of the pipe with vinegar (pouring stuff into the drain normally coats… the bottom of the pipe!)

Rinse with boiling water half an hour later. Repeat until nothing evil comes out of the drain :slight_smile:

Basil leaves keep ants away.

I had waged a year and a half biological campaign against the ant invasion in my kitchen. I had tried everything. My wife’s elderly YMCA class members recommended basil leaves around the sink. We tried it and of course it didn’t work…until they dried. It was so effective we threw them away a half a year ago and I still haven’t seen one ant.

Isopropyl alcohol works well too, put a little on a q-tip and put some on the bite.

Often, when people think they have no alcohol handy, they do have hand sanitizer gel. It does the trick on whiteboards.

I use peanut butter for my hiccups too - works 100% of the time for me.

If you really want newsprint, they sell some kind of packing paper at U-Haul locations that smells and feels like blank newsprint. Haven’t tried it for windows, but I bet it would work well.