Taking care of your belongings doesn't always have to cost money. The internet is filled with DIY hacks you can try at home to maintain your belongings.
Journalist Katie Couric shared a TikTok video of her trying out a DIY hack to clean some of her silver heirlooms.
The scoop
"I found a lot of silver from my grandmother, and a lot of this stuff was tarnished," Couric explains in her video. She decides to try to clean her silver using some aluminum foil, baking soda, salt, and hot water.
@katiecouric Tried cleaning some of my silver. 😅 Let me know if you have any other tips or tricks!
♬ original sound - Katie Couric
Couric covers a large bowl with aluminum foil, places her silver items inside the bowl, and sprinkles some baking soda and salt over the silver. She then pours hot water into the foil until the water covers all of the silver items. Couric lets the bowl of hot water sit for five minutes and then checks on the silver.
"This little bell that I put in here," Couric says as she fished out one of the silver bells from the bowl. "Wow."
She uses a pair of tongs to continue fishing out the silver items, each time still impressed with the success of the DIY hack. Although some items did not come out completely polished, Couric was still amazed at how much shinier her silver heirlooms were.
Some warn this approach could be too strong in some cases and strip patina that may be desirable to keep intact or even erode a small degree of the silver itself, so it's still best to visit a professional for restoring any high-value antique silver items. Nonetheless, it's a great budget option for pieces of similar age and value to the ones Couric showed off and perhaps even more of a no-brainer for tarnished items purchased at a thrift store.
"I have used this process successfully on family heirloom silverware, thrift store silver plate and 'newer' pieces I received as wedding presents," wrote Pam Kessler for House of Hawthornes, where she showed off impressive results across before-and-after images. "I would not try this on authentic antique pieces that may be worth a lot of money."
How it's helping
Natural cleaning solutions like baking soda, aluminum foil, and hot water can be just as effective as popular store-bought cleaning products, which tend to have a lot of harmful chemicals that may be detrimental to human health and the environment.
Baking soda can be used to remove odors, reduce or remove stains, and polish metals as a mild abrasive, which as Couric shows, does work.
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Even if it may be hard to escape the grips of popular store-bought cleaners, using DIY cleaning hacks like this silver-cleaning one can save you money on cleaning products by using what you probably already have at home.
What everyone's saying
Some commenters suspected that the reason why some of Couric's silver items did not come out as shiny as others was because of the item's silver content.
"It works best for sterling silver, not as good for sterling plated," one commenter theorized.
"It's easier in an aluminum foil pan," another user suggested.
"I'd love to try this," a third commenter wrote.
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