House Rules: Cleaning with cola and other handy tips

Small disasters can lead to all sorts of discoveries. I was getting ready to cut the grass when all of a sudden there was petrol all over the garage floor. Of course I was trying to fill the mower too quickly. Obviously I’d decided to do without the funnel. And we won’t even entertain the fact that I kept pouring, unable to quite believe, for a few crucial moments, what was going on.

But how flammable is petrol? Very. So what can you do? The answer is: cat litter. Following a minor disaster, a trawl of the internet introduces you to a whole world of people who’ve been just as hasty or clumsy as you, and a wealth of solutions. So instead of cutting the grass, I discovered that, alongside covering spilled petrol with kitty litter, I can get oil off a silk shirt with talcum powder and biro off cotton with hairspray.

Another trick to get oil spatters off clothes is, apparently, artificial sweetener. Finally a use for those little sachets you find languishing alongside the real thing in cafés. Lipstick on your collar? Wodge up bread and dab away.

The internet leads you down intriguing paths. From petrol to oil, silk to cotton, pretty soon I was learning to fix things I don’t even own.

There’s a perkiness to internet cleaning tips that’s rather comforting. Nothing is a disaster, merely an opportunity to be creative with everyday items. A smelly waste disposal unit? Just make ice cubes out of vinegar, send them down and crunch them up. Dusty ceiling fan blades? Slide them, one by one, into a pillowcase and out again. The dust stays in the pillowcase. That’s the kind of ingeniously clever trick that would almost make you want a ceiling fan just so you could try it. I presume you turn it off first.

More ideas include dusting with duct tape (sounds pretty time consuming) and shining up house plants with mayonnaise. And my own personal favourite? To clean hard water marks from the toilet, fill the bowl with cola, wait for an hour, then flush. As with the ceiling fan, I start to think, “if only I had hard water . . .”