Oxi clean on blood spots where you can't ensure a good rinsing. Works to get Henry's off your hands if used with a pumice stone.

If you can rinse an item back off the best thing for blood is ammonia.

Kaboom is the best at removing semi permanent hair dye from tubs.

A little lye will get off any caked cooking grease (this is an extreme solution for extreme buildup)

Baking soda on vomit to neutralize the acid so it doesn't eat carpet.

Dawn in clothes with motor oil (still not sure how to get soybean oil out)

If you have reptiles in your household the best for odors (other than a thorough cleaning) is a product called healthy habitat.

Febreeze can help if you have contact allergies to pets. Just spray down your bed or chair and it will stop hives (may not work for everyone but it worked for Ocean).

Vinegar on hard thin hard water stains.

Power clean is an awesome product for automotive cleaning.

Simple green on poo and pee spots on carpets.

Adrea

I second that motion regarding Simple Green working wonders. I should have bought stock in the company with this new addition!

Here's another tip:

Those fist size holes that may pop up in the living room walls from time to time after certain football games can easily be patched up with some mesh cloth and sheetrock patch kit.

Food burned on the bottom of a pot and you can't scrub it off no matter what?

Put some water and Dawn dishwashing liquid in the pot and boil it on the stove and it will scrub off.

3% hydrogen peroxide is good at taking blood out too but not the real old set in stuff.

Got skunked? Chlorhexadine (Nolvasan®) solution will *instantly* kill the smell of skunk when applied to your pet's fur. Needs to be rinsed off so the skin doesn't get dried out. There's also shampoo with chlorhexadine that works well too.

If you can't find chlorhexadine, Dawn dish soap plus baking soda will work better than tomato juice. Remember to wear gloves when you are washing someone who has been skunked otherwise your hands will smell like skunk.

LOL @ Mr. Fi's need for repairs! Thankfully we have not gotten to that level yet here at Camp Nappy®. Not yet.

Mr. Clean Magic Eraser will suck the volume of pee that a GSD puppy's bladder left in the carpet when negligent parents were too lazy to get out of bed when nature called. :-)

Dump some baking soda down your drains and add a little water at night. Give it a lot of time to freshen the pipes.

LMAO!!!! @ fist-sized holes in the wall!!! Ohhh, man, that may come in handy later today. *pointed look @ man in Vikings helmet sitting in my living room*

Dawn is awesome, too! So many good uses for it.

Also, for the burned, stubborn bits on the bottom of pots, I pour in enough wine to cover the bottom and then boil....making sure the pan is coolish before adding the wine, of course. (I don't want to lose my eyebrows yet again...:D) Great deglazer!

Brenda

Wow, does Nolvasan really work on skunk smell?

And yes, Dawn works on motor oil on fabrics, unfortunately not on Golden Retrievers :(

Oxy Clean works great on the red wine on the white table cloth too.

S

Thanks for all the blood stain removing tips.
"Jack the Ripper"

P.S. Whom or what is "Henry's"?

I'm curious about Henry, too. This is one I found a few months ago and have been happy with. If your house drainage pipes get clogged or back up often pour a large bottle of Pepsi or Coke into the drain the furthest from the pipe that exits the house. It must go in when there is 8 hours for it to work, so plan ahead. I think you can use cheap stuff so long as it is not diet pop and has lots of carbonation. Sandy

Fist sized holes in the wall??

Hi S. Yep good ol' Nolvasan does it in an instant! A few years ago when we had 3 dogs, all went out one morning to pee and they all came back skunked! Mrs. Skunk probably had a great time at her bridge game later on in the day as she told her friends how she got three dogs in one shot!

Anyway, it was 6:00 ~ish in the morning and we have three very smelly dogs. Out of desperation I grabbed a jug of Nolvasan (don't we all have one of those gallon jugs just laying around the house?) and dumped it straight on one of the dogs.

Miracle of miracles! Connie was no longer smelly! So Heidy and Bosco got the same done to them. It kills the smell but that oily goo is still in the hair. Later in the day they got their faces washed with a shampoo that had chlorhexadine in it. I don't remember the brand name.

It also killed the smell when sprayed on the rug on the breezeway. When the trio came home they were wiping their skunky faces on the rug to try to get rid of what was sprayed on them.

Did they learn? NOPE! Connie and Heidy got skunked exactly 3 weeks later! LOL! We've given some out to clients to kill the smell of cat urine in their homes and they report it has worked well for that problem too. Fortunately we haven't needed to try that here. *~*~*~*~*~*~*

Hi Mr. Horton! I've seen your RCGoosi flying formation for a few weeks now. *Very* impressive! :-)

To remove cat urine (and odor) from carpet using cheap ingredients:

If fresh urine soak up as much as possible with paper towels first and if an older area, that is still odorous, do the following:

1. If you can replace the carpet pad under the affected area than cut away a square of the pad that is soaked and discard. Make sure you have a piece of new pad. If not, then clean the pad underneath as well, as follows:

2. Soak area completely with white vinegar (carpet and pad if not replacing pad). Let it sit for 20 minutes or so and then soak up as much as possible with paper towels. Allow to dry - use a fan to speed up the process if desired.

2. After this dries, apply a liberal amount of baking soda over the affected area and drizzle with a quarter cup of hydrogen peroxide mixed with a teaspoon of Dawn dishwashing liquid. Use as much of the mixture as necessary depending on the size of the cleanup. Work it in with a scrub brush or your fingers (wearing rubber gloves) to disolve the baking soda. Work it deep into the fibers and old pad (if keeping). Allow to dry and then vacuum it up.

Repeat the process if a really old nasty stain with odor.

Here's how it works: The acidic vinegar neutralizes the ammonia in the urine and hydrogen peroxide is a powerful oxidizer which kills the bacteria that causes the odor. Baking soda also absorbs odor and the Dawn cleans the area of dirt and more odors.

Using water and rug shampoo to clean urine does not remove it and at first you think it is working but then it starts smelling again. That is because the bacteria is still working and the ammonia has not been neutralized.

I've used this on cat urine stains in two places in my home (an older cat started going in these two spots) and it has worked very well at a fraction of the cost of those odor removal kits that cost $50 and up.

I highly recommend you can buy some scrap carpet padding and cut away the old and replace with a new patch of padding (if feasible). It will greatly save time and work much better as the pad is harder to get all the fibers clean deep down unlike the carpet itself which has a more open weave.

Wow lots of good stuff!

Bon-Ami or barkeepers friend will remove alot of stains from hard surfaces. Especially rust stains! And marring on ceramic surfaces. Great stuff.

Henry's is nasty roof patch that stays on skin real nice..

Discovered today: when the rings (that you set the pots on) on the gas stove are all splattered with oily spots and it cooked and baked on and won't come off in the dishwasher, put the rings in the oven and set it to its auto-clean program. Incinerates the spots right off. My cook top looks like new. Not kidding. Except for it being chipped of course.

Then I used elbow grease, a scrubbie, Dawn, and warm water do clean the kitchen chairs and table from a week-and-a-half worth of little people's sticky fingers and food remains. I'm thinking, when I give the kitchen floor its matching treatment tomorrow, there will be Dawn in the bucket as well!

:) Mary

Anyone have a Roomba?? I got one for mom for christmas. What a great tool! Cleans the house every day. picks up cat/dog hair everywhere!! Our rugs are looking better everyday. It's amazing to see how much better they look! I have to clean it out after every run, but so farit's been worth every penny!

I don't have one, Heather, but I've always wondered just how well they work. Now I know! Wish I'd considered that before investing so much in a Dyson. :D

Brenda

Brenda, Watch woot.com they have them for $100 refirb. 90 day warrenty.

Sell your Dyson - they didn't rate highly in Consumer Reports. But none can compare to one you don't have to push around yourself!

I agree Oxy-Clean is one of those "wonder" products that seems to have 1001 uses -- it will help break down stubborn organic compounds, too, if you ever need to unclog something that says you can't use drain cleaner, although it takes longer and isn't as aggressive.

Talcum powder rubbed into oily or greasy stains before washing will also help eliminate many of them.

As for stubborn cleaning tasks that require something with a sort of detergent to it and can be well rinsed, I've never seen anything top Clorox Clean-up... I once had a cooler that sat in the back of a truck all winter with broken bottles of wine coolers sloshing back and forth, until I finally got around to cleaning it out in late April -- after all that stuff had a good chance to ferment and mold and stuff -- yeah, it was RANK -- looked like something better thrown out... Instead, I dumped it out, sprayed it down with Clorox Clean-up, let it sit for a bit, scrubbed it with a brush a little, hosed it off good and rinsed it a few times to get all the detergent out and except for the scratch marks from the broken glass you'd have never known what it HAD looked like.

I also use it in the bottle of my Stanley "Thermos" when I accidentally leave coffee in there too long and it gets "bad" on the bottom, and it cleans that out, too... Since it's stainless steel inside, I can do that, but if it were plastic on the inside, I'm not sure if I could effectively rinse all the chlorine smell and taste out of a hole that small, so I might not.

Happy Tiphunting!
Jeff

Hi Jeff!

:) Mary