How to drink your coffee and use it too!

When you are looking around at home projects to do, first formulate a plan, and then get busy. But before you do anything else, why don’t you just sit back, relax a bit, and grab a cup of coffee.
As you sit there drinking and pondering what your next move is, one thing is for sure, you are going to have a mess of grounds to get rid of. Well, fear not friends, in the maintenance business, sometimes improvisation is the mainstay to solving problems. So, stay relaxed, take another sip, and I'll give you a few new ideas here that just might make you look at coffee a bit differently.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Ground coffee, any variety
• A coffee pot
• A coffee cup
• Ingenuity

1. Coffee grounds are one of the best sweeping compounds you will ever use. They can be either fresh out of the can, or dried used ones from the pot. Sprinkled liberally on a garage or any cement floor, they will absorb oils, grease and dust exactly like the commercial made types will. But here’s a little twist. If you use fresh grounds, you can pick any flavor you’d like, and when you are sweeping, the aroma will positively freshen up any stale room! I personally like a nutty blend for stuffy basement floors, and a heavier mocha for outdoor garage or utility shed floors.

2. The acids in coffee grounds make a heck of a good electrical contact cleaner. The finer the grind, the better, and all you need do is moisten a finger, dip into the grounds and rub it over any tarnished connection. It will make the metal shine and take off any build up of dirt and restore your connection to like new status. After cleaning, wipe the residue off and you’ll be good to go.

3. That same concoction works equally as good as a mild abrasive for cleaning too. You can use old grounds for this, they don’t even have to be dried. Just dip a sponge into some old grounds, pour a tiny amount of dish soap over the top, and you will be able to clean anything that you would normally use kitchen cleanser on. A coarse ground works best for this, and in some ways it is even better than a cleanser. Coffee grounds will break down under scrubbing because they are natural. That means it will be very difficult to leave noticeable scratches on a nice finish that you want to preserve.

4. Did you ever spill gasoline on your hands at the pump, and then no matter how much you wash them, your hands still smell like gas? The fix for this is fresh coffee grounds. Once again, the finer the ground the better, so just sprinkle some on your hands with a little dish soap, and scrub them thoroughly. Not only does the dish soap cut through the gasoline, but the fresh grounds neutralize the odor, and when you rinse, your hands will smell like fresh coffee! A little more dish soap will get rid of that smell completely, if you so desire.

Tips & Warnings

• Unless you want a particular left over smell, the cheapest natural smelling coffee works as well as the most expensive.
• Also, The Maintenance Guy columns are always at their finest during coffee breaks.

[Susanh]

on 2/27/2009 Fantastic tips on how to use those coffee grounds!