Orangeman Burns - Sriram Sridharan's Blog

Imagine this: You are cooking a wonderful fish based recipe for some guests. The dish is simmering away and you turn to rearrange the cushions. Suddenly your partner comes in and tells you that the house stinks of raw fish. What do you do?

Or imagine this: You have a kid/pet in your house who’s not potty trained yet and poopy smells are pretty common place in your house. What do you do when you have guests over for dinner?

If you said “use air fresheners”, you’re partly on the right track. But what about the recurring monthly expenses and the possible respiratory problems that you’ll get with prolonged use? Don’t worry. I have a simple and quick home-made tip that’ll fix this stinky problem in a jiffy. This household tip also works equally well in toilets, showers, office cubicles, WCs, etc.

What you need:

• An empty spray bottle
• A few drops of any essential oil [substitute with Vanilla or any food grade essence if you’re not yuppie enough to have essential oil around]

How to go about it:

• Rinse the spray bottle to get rid of any pre-existing obnoxious smells. I find that using a small dab of toothpaste in the bottle and rinsing it thoroughly to eliminate foam is the best way to go about it.
• Work the spray action a few times to get rid of any fluid in the nozzle and to fill it with fresh tap water.
• Take the nozzle out of the bottle and “dry spray” a few times to get rid of the tap water.
• Pour a little tap water into the bottle until halfway.
• Add 5 drops essential oil or Vanilla essence to the water in the bottle.
• Shake thoroughly until the mixture forms an emulsion.
• Spray in the room like you would with an air freshener.

Note: I used both food grade Vanilla essence and Lemon Grass essential oil [Courtesy of my sister]. They both worked equally well with the Vanilla essence making the room smell absolutely regal and smooth [Don’t ask me how a room can smell smooth]. The Lemon Grass essential oil based room fresher’s smell reminded me of a popular Indian pain balm called Amrutanjan. I also noted that the essential oil mixture wasn’t that effective the following morning. So avoid storing the mixture for long periods of time. Essential oils can usually irritate the skin when in direct contact, so take care when preparing the mixture. Also avoid getting the mixture in your eyes.

Just try this technique and experiment it with different essential oils and fragrances and let me know how it worked in the comments.

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Labels: Air freshener, amrutanjan, Aromatherapy, bad, blog, diy, Essential oil, hold, home, house, lemon grass oil, odor, refillable, remove, smell, sriram sridharan, sriraminhell, tips, tricks, Vanilla