How To De-odorize Your Home?
Is there a persisting smell in your house and you are unable to put a finger on it? Then, it is time to do the annual cleaning of your home. Even while doing that, there are ways to check the source of the smell and get rid of it.
What to clean?
If you are looking to spot the much disturbing smell, the way to start is either replace or clean the following in your home:
1. Bedding, linens and sofa covers
2. Trash can
3. Carpets
4. Filters of vents in halls and the AC, fire extinguisher
How to clean?
In the case of carpets, try and take professional help. Replace the trash can. Vents are the toughest to clean but can lock in smells in their ducts. If the smell intensifies after opening them, replace the entire duct.
If you want to generally give your home a cleaning, use baking soda in your bathrooms and other wet areas. It can dissolve a lot of dirt away and remove stains along with smells. A number of women also use vinegar sprays around the house to keep the smells away. Using a deodorizer in the vacuum cleaner is also a very good way of spraying a new smell across the house. Washing old cupboards and hard plastic cans with salt also helps.
Replace the smell
Commercial air fresheners are good but their impact lasts for a shorter period of time. Many of them are allergic to some of them and come in a specified set of odors. If you want to make your home smell good without using them, there are a lot of homemade substitutes. Here are a few from grandmother's home journal that can make a huge difference:
1. Coffee beans: Grind them and brew it and it soaks away the scent in a fridge or the kitchen. It helps with those odors, which are not very stubborn.
2. Dried orange and lemon peels: Burning them is a very effective way to remove odors. They burn for a long time and spread it across the room.
3. Peppermint oil: Clean your drains in the kitchen and the bathroom with peppermint oil and that can help it stay neat for months.
4. Incense: If it a smell that has spread through the room, burn an incense at edges and corners of the room.
5. Scented candles: Use scented candles occasionally. It not just drowns away small smells like old shoes and mats but also lights up the home in a beautiful way.
If nothing works, bake a cake or a batch of cookies. It will certainly make the home smell good and is not the worst way to treat yourself after all the heavy cleaning.
(Katya Naidu has been working as a business journalist for the last nine years, and has covered beats across banking, pharma, healthcare, telecom, technology, power, infrastructure, shipping and commodities)