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Home Hints/How Do I...? - thebroadroom.net: December 2005
Disclaimer: these hints and tips are either the result of personal experience, or have been culled from various sources.
TheBroadroom.Net reminds you to use your own judgment and caution in applying any of this advice.
Cleaning candle wax off a carpet
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
Saturday, December 31, 2005
at 12:29 PM (Pacific)
Candle Wax In The Carpet
There are some instructions on using an ice pack to get out the big chunks if you have them.
This actually does work...you get out your iron and start out with a "warm" setting. You get out a small stack of paper towels.
You lay a paper towel flat over the wax and use the iron to "iron" the paper towel over it. The trick is to start out with a low iron setting. You can increase the heat cautiously if needed (i.e. you don't want to melt your carpet!).
Once each towel has started to turn translucent by absorbing the melted wax, you can replace it with a fresh towel. Keep doing this (it's a faster process than it sounds) until the wax is gone.
 
2005, the year in home hints!
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
Friday, December 30, 2005
at 10:00 PM (Pacific)
Lessee...
My cheap toaster theory is holding up fine. i.e. my ten dollar toaster is still toasting along just fine.
I have, sadly enough, become addicted to Oxi Clean. At the onset, I intended to use this only for whites and the kids' clothes. I resisted its instructions to "use a scoop in every load!" I'm far too cheap to start out doing that.
But, the dang stuff works so well. I've stopped using hot water for my whites. I use warm water and Oxi Clean, and they're whiter than they would have been in hot water. I now do use a scoop in virtually every load. Oh well.
That's about it. I'm still waiting for the automated laundry system...the robots that load the laundry into the washer, remove it when it's done, shake out each piece and load the dryer. Robots can even handle simple folding. Why not? Everything else involving endless manual drudgery is already being done by machines.
There's no reason we can't have a small robot to wash the floors...exactly the same way there already exist small robots to do "men's chores" such as mowing the grass and cleaning the swimming pool.
There's no reason we can't design houses around the concept of making them easier to clean...around the concept that we shouldn't keep a human being at home solely to clean the house. i.e., hire the people who clean the houses, to start thinking outside the box. Let us just assume that no one really should spend their entire waking hours cleaning. Let us finally make that self-cleaning house.
Anyhow those are my thoughts for 2005.
Fresh eggs and shoelaces
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
Monday, December 19, 2005
at 12:36 PM (Pacific)
Here are a couple of tips I got from a Safeway cereal box:
Fresh eggs are chalky and rough, old eggs are smooth and shiny.
When buying new shoelaces for your child's shoe, count the number of lace holes on one side of the shoe and multiply by six. If the shoe has 5 holes, you need 30 inch shoelaces.
Now, that second tip might well be better for adult's shoes since my kids tend to either wear out, or outgrow, their shoes long before the shoes need new laces. And I haven't tried it out yet but it stands to reason that it would work.
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