Make more room in your freezer by transfering food from
boxes into freezer bags. Cut out " contents and cooking
instructions" from box and placing into bag. You'll be
surprised by how much space boxes take up.

Make Whiffy Trainers smell nice by inserting a sock filled with newspaper and talc . Cheesy smells goodbye

Rub a sticky zip with the lead of a pencil to unstick it.It really does work

Use Air freshener to clean mirrors . Just spray on and rub hard with a dry cloth . This is especially good for bathroom mirrors - two birds with one stone !!!

This is simple but effective. Grind rice in your coffee blender to sharpen the blades. The hard rice acts a bit like a butchers steel . Easy !!!

When you have ironed your bed linen,fold the sheets and pillowcases in with the duvet cover and slide onto the shelf.No more hunting for the matching set in the airing cupboard.

To save on unnecessary ironing, fold your larger items of household laundry - sheets, duvets, or even long dresses - and place flat in the washing machine.
They will wash fine and will eliminate the inevitable creases caused by the drum 'mixing' the clothes.

Clean bathroom and kitchen grout with thick bleach and an old toothbrush - really effective and alot cheaper than those whitening kits.

To clean hard to reach parts of laminate floor, eg, behind the tv etc, use a feather duster.

To save on ironing - when hanging washing outside, hang shirts, tshirts, trousers etc onto hangers. Take them off the line and straight into the wardrobe. Saves ironing 9 times out of 10.

To prevent strong smells in your fridge, simply place a small bowl of bicarbonate of soda inside. No more smells!

Sick of males splashing on wall behind toilet? Buy an ectra roll of wallpeper. Blu tac a piece of spare wallpaper onto wall. When grubby just remove and replace. No more nasty stains.

When you are a bit short of time, and haven't got the time/energy to do the house work properly, just sprinkle a few drops of perfume oil onto the filters of your hoover (cyclone models like dyson) and then have a quick hoover around. It leaves a lovely perfume smell and gives the impression that you have polished the house from top to bottom

When cicular plastic container lids become distorted out of shape, stand in boiling water for a
couple of minutes and they become pliable enough to fit over their container again.

VINEGAR, VINEGAR, VINEGAR. Vinegar is one thing everyone should have available for cleaning! Put vinegar in with the water when cleaning windows and buff up with old newspaper for a smear free glass finish.
Put vinegar on taps and leave for removal of limescale.
Put half a cup full of vinegar in a kettle three quarters full of water and boil for removal of kettle limescale build up (remember to re-boil kettle afterwards with clean water).
Smokers in the house? Put a small bowl in a corner, out of the way, with malt vinegar inside and leave. This will remove old tobacco smells.
Someone in the house got a bit sunburned, then run a bath with a couple of capfuls of vinegar and put them in to soak. This will take the sting out of the sunburn.
I could go on about the virtues of vinegar, just remember to add a bottle for your cleaning cupboard to your shopping list!

Small dirty marks on carpets can be easily removed with a quick rub from a wet wipe.

Dirt inside your window sills and other hard to reach places? Use damp cotton buds, they are small enough to clean those tiny corners.

Scratches on polished furniture? Match up colour with wax shoe polish (sometimes you can get away with a darker colour depending on the colour of the wood grain), rub in and then polish over the top. Hey Presto you will never know there was a scratch.

To clean a microwave when there is loads of cooked on food on the top, put a large bowl of water in with 4 slices of lemon. Heat on high power for 5 minutes. The water will heat up and loosen the food and the lemon will make it smell lovely.

There are a few comments about baby oil getting rid of smears on stainless steal, but if you don't like the smell of baby oil you can use olive oil instead. Put it on a piece of kitchen roll the same as the baby oil.

Just a reminder that the Goody Bag Giveaway competition closes at midnight tonight, so there’s still time to submit your top tips! We’re sure you’ll agree that there are some really great tips on the boards – choosing the ten winners is going to be a tricky business! We’ll notify the winners by email and we’ll publish the winning entries in a Top Ten article on the Chat homepage next week.

Best wishes

UK Style Team

With old houses it is worth keeping upto date with all those niggling maintainance jobs,it is far cheaper to do them straight away than let them build up and cost a fortune of prevent a prospective purchaser from making an offer on your house.

To get wax out of a carpet, rug or any type of fabric, just take a old tea towel, place it over the stain and iron over it. The wax should then stick to the tea towel..

Before throwing away old clothes first remove any buttons. Keep these all together and build up a collection. That way if you lose a button on a current item of clothing you want to keep wearing you should be able to find a close match to use.

Why not use supermarket carrier bags as pedal bin liners. They are an ideal size, have handles that can be used to tie them up and saves money too!