This Is the Easiest Way to Make Your Home Smell Incredible.
Last week I saw on social media a way to make your house smell nice, but it was pretty bad. This included adding essential oils to the vacuum cleaner, which you should never do . Instead, I recommended a few other tips for scenting your home, but they all focused on neutralizing odors rather than introducing pleasant ones into the environment. This week, however, social media provided me with a new suggestion on how to make any room smell good—and it won’t hurt your vacuum cleaners (or anything else). To do this, you need to hide small pads with the aroma of the extract around the house.
Use extracts to easily scent your home
First of all, I saw this video from Kelly the Cleaner , a TikTokker who loves cleaning and wearing pink. I immediately believed her when she said that if you put a little extract on furniture pads and hide it in the house, the place would smell nice, but I still had some concerns and wanted to test it out.
My first concern was, “What is furniture overlay?” I went to Target where I found some duct tape felt pads that I realized had an adhesive backing and were meant to be stuck under the legs of chairs so they wouldn’t scratch the hardwood floors. (I have rugs; I didn’t know!) The ones I bought aren’t on Target’s website, but they’re comparable to his $4.97 set of 32 rugs .
My second concern was, “Will the extract attract bugs?” I consulted Lifehacker baking guru Ellie Reinmann, and she said that while extracts are used in food, they themselves contain too much alcohol to be considered a food. They, she said, “don’t have any sugar or anything that would promote bacterial growth,” so I was sold. She did wonder how long the scent would last since the extract would likely evaporate quickly, but I assured her I would find out. I bought regular old McCormick pure vanilla extract ($8.39 for two ounces).
Then I had to work.
How to discreetly scent your home
I took out a sheet of six notepads and placed it on the counter. I decided to apply a small piece to each pad while they were still attached to the backing, which turned out to be a lot smarter than I thought. The extract overflowed from the bottle and spread all over the leaf, so I had to kind of move it around so that it touched all the pads. Some pads had more extract and others had less. I thought it was a good experiment. I noticed that they looked a little shiny, but absorbed the liquid quite quickly, so I left them for five minutes to fully absorb. I then took one of the lightly dampened pads and stuck it under the countertop.
It smelled nice straight away, like vanilla, but I was wondering how long it would last. I put the sheet with the five remaining pads in another room to see if the smell would be more intense and lasting.
It’s been about four hours since I did this, but I can still smell the vanilla in both rooms. Great success.
The good thing about this method is that the pads are already sticky, so you can hide them anywhere, unlike other types of air fresheners. This technique is also reliable because you won’t have to buy new pads often. If you want, you can try essential oils—they’ll likely last longer since the oil doesn’t evaporate as much as an alcohol-based extract does. However, the extract worked great for me.