List your favorite/untraditional cleaning/restoration tips ...

[Sclass]

Untraditional cleaning tip?
Don't place your stuff on top of counters, sills, tabletops, speakers, cabinets, nor on the floor. Horizontal surface is not meant for storage, they are meant for temporary usage. Storage is for storage.
You'll be done dusting and vacuuming in half the time.

So: no tv, few flowers if any on window sills, cupboard have doors to keep dust out, keys, wallets chargers and shit have a box they they belong in (preferably inside a drawer), rather than lie around on drawers or table tops. etc etc

Are you in manufacturing? This was explained to me by a Kaizen manufacturing engineer who reorganized an assembly line for me. He literally removed all the horizontal surfaces that were not used in all the work stations. People stopped putting junk there because there was no place to put junk down. He literally converted the work cells with a sawzall. It made the workers mad at first but it really resulted in great efficiency and I personally believed it brought down our particle counts in the clean areas because people weren't bringing their personal items in and plunking them down on the benches. We bought the employees lockers.

[GandK]

How do you get black scuff marks on walls? Having raised a teenager it's still a mystery to me.
Do you wear shoes indoors?

No, we don't. It's a mystery to me as well, and I've resigned myself to never getting a good answer because none exists. It's right up there with "is objectivity really possible?" and "why is every train station in Europe playing 'The Bangles'?"

[jacob]

... "why is every train station in Europe playing 'The Bangles'?"

Ohh?! Blame the Hoff! and the Germans. Also Ace of Base.

This has been going on for two decades by now. Nobody understands the causation but everybody seems to see the correlation

PS: My Apologies to Germany ... but I just had to do it. And you know it's true Feel free to return fire

[FBeyer]

Untraditional cleaning tip?
Don't place your stuff on top of counters, sills, tabletops, speakers, cabinets, nor on the floor. Horizontal surface is not meant for storage, they are meant for temporary usage. Storage is for storage.
You'll be done dusting and vacuuming in half the time.

So: no tv, few flowers if any on window sills, cupboard have doors to keep dust out, keys, wallets chargers and shit have a box they they belong in (preferably inside a drawer), rather than lie around on drawers or table tops. etc etc

Are you in manufacturing? ....

No, but I treat most of my doings like so
I just considered it a structural solution to a problem normally seen as one only fixed with elbow grease.
Of course my GF has not the slightest fucking clue how/why that system is suppsed to work so she's still putting her useless shit all over the place

[GandK]

A recent list of DIY cleaning products from Lifehacker.

My favorite idea on their list: the magnetic scrubber.

[jacob]

* Surface rust is very easily removed by scrubbing it with a piece of crumbled up aluminum foil and any kind of lubricant (cooking oil, wd40, ...)
* For wooden handles, I like to sand them down and then apply a layer or two of "Danish Oil" (tung or linseed oil)

[KevinW]

Soaking in plain tap water for long periods works surprisingly well. I've cleaned up some real doozies of caked-on messes by soaking 1 day, scraping off a loose layer of gunk, and repeating for a few days.

+1 to Goo Gone for glue residue, labels, and other gummy messes.

Coca Cola works as a rust remover. Being an acid, though, I imagine it takes a lot of material with it too.

[jacob]

Coca Cola works as a rust remover. Being an acid, though, I imagine it takes a lot of material with it too.

If you shake the bubbles out, the carbonic acid buffer balance is removed and the pH drops to 2.4 or so due to the phosphoric acid. Same acting agent as naval jelly, another good rust remover. I wonder whether the bubbles act to increase the reaction speed. Otherwise it would be more effective to use flat cola.

[JL13]

I tried to buy some naval jelly at the hardware store the other day. The clerk wouldn't sell it to me because he thought it was too toxic and gave me some steel wool instead. It didn't work. :/

[Riggerjack]

The clerk wouldn't sell it to me because he thought it was too toxic

The clerk wouldn't sell it to you... Because you weren't naval jelly licensed?

What hardware store do you shop in that has clerks empowered to demand "your papers!", and why would you shop there?

[JL13]

Well he said "you don't want to buy that let me show you what to do." I'm quite sure I was free to purchase it if I had insisted.

[henrik]

Vinegar in the fabric softener dispenser of the washing machine will get out smells and brighten whites.

How much vinegar? Do you know of any clothing materials that don't work well with vinegar in the washing cycle?
The main reason I'm asking is that vinegar should also work well against limescale buildup in the machine, but I somehow have a moral problem running the machine empty just to clean it:)

[jennypenny]

I think you're supposed to use 1/2 cup (125ml IIRC), but I just fill the fabric softener dispenser to the top. If you don't have one, add the vinegar to the rinse cycle.

I've used it on all of our sports clothing (tech and cotton), dress shirts, cotton, jeans, and all linens with no problems. Makes darks darker and whites whiter, and it's good at getting rid of most odors. I keep a spray bottle of vinegar in the laundry room and spray directly onto the underarms of shirts to get rid of deodorant gunk and keep whites from yellowing.

Make sure it's distilled white vinegar.

[Ydobon]

White vinegar is now our go to for general purpose cleaning, marvellous stuff, just dilute some in a cheap gardening spray bottle (think ours was £0.50) with water and away you go. Don't waste your money buying tiny bottles at inflated prices, we bulk order 20l at a time from a Chinese supermarket. It's not like it can go bad!

Agree with GandK on microfibre cloths, pennies each when bought in quantity and very handy.

[tsch]

Toothpaste can be a useful soft polisher. Used to use it on my timex watch face. Just used it to remove the very last bits of residue of a label on a plastic container I wanted to keep.