How-To Guides about Housekeeping

The garbage disposal that's been humming along fine for years isn't necessarily fine. It's possible the machine is doing its job perfectly, and the real problem is thirty feet downstream, where grease has been solidifying into a waxy plug on your pipe walls for months.

The research gives one hard number: two days. Anything wet for two or more days may already have mold growing on it, even when it looks and smells completely clean, according to Utah State University Extension. That guidance comes from flood-recovery research, not studies on forgotten laundry, but the underlying condition transfers: wet textiles are ideal breeding grounds for mold and mildew, and visible or olfactory cues become unreliable the longer fabric sits wet.

Most allergy-related laundry problems fall into two buckets: something in your laundry routine may be irritating your skin, or dust mites in your bedding may be triggering sneezing, congestion, coughing, or asthma symptoms at night.

How to Clean a Baseball Cap by Cap Type and Material

The safest way to clean a TV screen is simpler than most people think: a dry microfiber cloth first, distilled water only if needed, and no household cleaners. That's the whole method. Everything below explains why those three rules matter and what happens when you skip them.

Downsizing fails in predictable ways. Not because people get rid of too much or too little, but because they start without constraints, sort with the wrong criteria, and then spend their way back to where they started. The mistakes to avoid when downsizing aren't random; they follow a sequence. So does fixing them.

Most household ant problems can be resolved through cleanup, exclusion, and targeted bait. This guide walks through safe ant removal using those methods in sequence, then covers the three species where standard approaches either take longer or need to change entirely. If you need to get rid of ants inside and outside the house without broad pesticide application, you're in the right place.

By the end of this guide, you'll know how to make a bed properly in around ten minutes using a clean, repeatable sequence: smooth the fitted sheet, lock the flat sheet at the foot with hospital corners, center and fold back the duvet, and place the pillows. Done right, the bed should stay neat until you pull it apart that night.

Most empty candle jars are worth keeping. The glass is usually solid, the proportions are useful, and the only thing standing between a burned-out candle and a functional container is about an hour of work. This guide covers how to reuse candle jars from start to finish: how to get the wax out without cracking the glass or blocking the drain, which of the 11 reuse ideas fit which jar shape, and what to do if you'd rather refill or recycle.

By the end of this guide, you'll know exactly which desk clutter items to throw away, which ones just need a better address, and how a five-minute daily habit keeps the whole system from unraveling. The framework is simple: toss, relocate, reset. Everything here fits one of those three buckets.

Foil, plastic wrap, and parchment paper are among the most-reached-for items in any kitchen and among the most chaotically stored. Long boxes tip over in cabinets, plastic wrap tangles before it's useful, and the parchment roll ends up at the back of a shelf behind everything else. Knowing how to organize foil and plastic wrap in your kitchen is less about finding the perfect product and more about choosing the right location and system for how you actually cook.

Most people burn their first burst of decluttering energy on a linen closet or the top shelf of a bedroom closet. Dana K. White, author of Decluttering at the Speed of Life, explains why that backfires: you exhaust yourself on an obscure corner and the home doesn't actually look or function any better. Her visibility rule is blunter than most advice in this space go to the most visible room first, the place where guests would enter, because that's where you'll see and feel the return on your...

Start with a quick test: dab white vinegar onto the stained area. If it dissolves the deposit, the methods below apply. If nothing happens, the problem is likely mold or a different type of staining, hard water stains, and mold require entirely different treatments.

Most people can clear a kitchen drawer in an hour. The box of birthday cards from the last decade, the shelf of inherited figurines, the growing stack of a child's drawings those are still there, surviving every other round of decluttering. Not because the people holding onto them are disorganized. Because getting rid of them feels like erasing something real.

Start with one distinction: washing removable parts and descaling the internal system are two different jobs. They solve different problems and require different methods. Skip either one and the machine will show it slower brews, flat flavor, and over time, the kind of bacterial biofilm that forms invisibly in warm, damp reservoirs, per Time for Espresso (earlier this year).

Most doom piles don't start as neglect. They start as an attempt at organization: sorting through something, prepping for a trip, or gathering items for a project. Then something interrupts the process, and the pile sits. Then more things land on it. Then it becomes the kind of problem that's easier to walk past than to face.

Pull clothes from the dryer and find them creased, and the instinct is usually to blame the machine or resign yourself to ironing. The likelier culprit is simpler: timed dry, the default setting on most dryers, has no way of knowing when clothes are actually done. It runs to the clock, not to the fabric.

This guide walks you through the ski slope decluttering method step by step: what it is, why it works, exactly how to do it, and where it breaks down including when not to use it at all.