10 brilliant uses for CHALK

Keep a hamper smelling fresh

Damp towels and dirty workout clothes can leave your hamper with a stale, musty odor. To outsmart the problem, drop a few pieces of sidewalk chalk into an unsealed plastic baggie and place it in the bottom of the hamper. The chalk will soak up excess moisture, preventing stinky mildew from lingering. (For best results, replace the chalk every few weeks.)

Ant-proof your pup’s bowl

You like to keep your dog’s food and water bowls on the porch, but you’ve spotted a few ants trying to share his food. To keep them away, use chalk to draw thick lines around the bowl. Chalk’s calcium carbonate is a natural insect repellent, so the pests won’t cross the border to get to the food.

Cover up a painting “oops”

While giving your dining room a fresh coat of paint, you got some splatters on the ceiling—and you’re all out of ceiling paint. The in-a-pinch fix: Use a piece of white chalk to color over the spots to hide them until you can get to the paint store.

Eliminate an unsightly wart

Before buying a pricey over-thecounter medication to heal the wart that popped up on your foot, try this simple at-home remedy: Carefully rub a piece of chalk over the blemish until it’s covered, then top with a bandage. Repeat daily until the wart heals. Warts thrive on moisture, but the calcium carbonate in the chalk will dry out the wart so it disappears.

Lift grease stains from leather

Oops! While out to lunch with a friend, you spilled salad dressing on your leather bag. The save: Cover the spot with chalk, then top with paper towels and a heavy book and let sit overnight. The book will press the chalk into the leather so it can absorb the grease.

Make sanding a breeze

You restored a table last weekend but had trouble determining whether you sanded the surface evenly. Next time, rub chalk over the surface before you start. When all the chalk dust is gone, you’ll know you sanded it evenly.

Outsmart ring around the collar

To eliminate those yellow sweat stains that tend to pop up on the collars of your husband’s white button-down shirts, rub a generous amount of white chalk over the problem areas and let sit for 10 minutes, then wash as usual. The chalk will absorb the body oils that cause the stain, leaving his shirts looking like new.

Protect silverware from tarnish

You only use your grandma’s silver on special occasions, but every time you pull it out, the utensils have tarnished. To prevent this from happening again, wrap a few pieces of chalk in cheesecloth and store it with the silverware. The chalk will soak up the sulfur compounds that cause silver to tarnish, so your utensils will remain perfectly polished between uses.

Brighten yellowed fingernails

Professional manicures look gorgeous, but with all your daily to-do’s around the house, the polish always chips off. An easy alternative for pretty nails: File nails, then glide a nail brush over a piece of white chalk and rub it under the tips of your nails. The brush will remove dirt and it will deposit the chalk’s powder under your nails so they look bright, white and stunning!

Map out furniture placement

You want to move your sofa to the opposite wall in the den, but your measurements show that doing so may make it tough to open the closet door. To test it out without moving the heavy couch, use chalk to mark the floor where the sofa would go. The chalk lines allow you to see if the new arrangement works before you move anything. When you’re finished, simply sweep up the chalk dust.