The Barnes & Noble Review
Holidays mean one thing to Hallmark and quite another to the self-styled Queen of Clean. There's New Year's Day and Super Bowl Sunday (guacamole stains on the carpet), Valentine’s Day (chocolate stains, champagne spills), Halloween (pumpkin mold on the porch), and so on. Thank goodness, Linda Cobb has cleaning solutions for every one of them.
Her practical suggestions are all delivered in a cheerful tone, with a reminder that life is for living, not for cleaning (but a clean, organized home can help your life).
Some of the tips are quite amazing. In fact, you wonder how anyone could have figured out that rubbing a pencil over a problematic zipper will help it glide smoothly. Or that putting a drop of baby oil on a tangled chain and pulling it apart with two sewing needles would actually work.
Dented Ping Pong balls? No problem. Simply drop them in a bowl of hot water and let them float around for a few minutes. Dirty golf balls? Not for Father's Day. Soak them in 1 cup warm water with 1/4 cup ammonia.
Cobb doesn't just have cleaning solutions to restore your home to normal. She also has ideas on improving your status quo, from fertilizing your garden with crushed eggshells and coffee grounds to organizing your children's closets for back-to-school. She also has good recommendations for dealing with allergy time, tax time, Easter, picnics, camping, and Christmas.
There are pet care tips, seasonal cold remedies, plus an outline of chores that should be done weekly, monthly, quarterly, biannually, and yearly.
(Ginger Curwen)
