Realistic Tools: The Cheese Spreader

My husband loves to watch that show, you know, the guy who lands in the wilderness with nothing but his muscles, his smarts, and twenty years in the British Navy Special forces. He manages to bushwhack his way to safety using his little pocket knife to spear unsuspecting catfish and his winter coat as a flotation device.

Now I'll be the first to admit that if I unexpectedly landed in the wilderness I'd be happy to just die there than have to eat snakes and bugs. But the show makes the point that sometimes you can use unexpected items to accomplish things you never would have thought of if you weren't in a tight spot.

This post is all about my favorite realistic tool, the cheese spreader.

The discovery of the amazing properties of a cheese spreader came when we had left the toolbox in someone's car right after the  move into our new house. Our 1950's kitchen came complete with coffee cup wallpaper and original homemade cabinetry in which the shelves had been covered in my arch nemesis, contact paper. For those of you who don't know, contact paper looks like wrapping paper and sticks on to your cabinet shelves making them even dirtier than the shelf would get all by itself with no paper on it.

Being under the sink, it had at some point in the past gotten wet from a leak and not only looked awful but smelled like grandmas attic from all the mildew. Add in some mouse droppings and you have yourself a pretty gross day.

(Side note: A mouse trap, thought it looks like one,  is NOT a chip clip)

I knew that I would have to remove the paper, but it was so stuck on from 60 years of sticking that there was no way it would come off without a tool. Having been given a micro amount of engineering ability from my dad's genetics, I started searching my boxes for something that could be used to scrape the paper off.. The cheese spreader with it's thin, angled sharp tip proved to be the perfect fix. In a few hours,  I had scraped all the paper of the shelves, doused them in bleach and voila! A coat of paint and they looked like new.

Since that day, I found that the simple household cheese spreader has more hidden qualities than I could ever have imagined.

In 8 months of home ownership I have used my cheese spreader for spackling, spreading woodfiller, scraping even more contact paper, scraping paint, removing wallpaper, moulding and trim work, wall repair, and even removing a fireplace surround:

It's all about using what you have to make great things happen in your home.