I spilled some oil in my garage the other day and with nothing obvious to mop it up, I brushed some sawdust from the other side of the garage onto it. When I swept up the oil-soaked sawdust, the floor was amazingly clean.

Maybe that’s not a revelation for everyone, but it certainly was for me. It worked so well that I looked on-line to see whether sawdust is a recognised way to pick up spilled oil… and it is! In fact you can get specially treated sawdust that absorbs even more than “standard” sawdust, but even the stuff I had available worked really well. I now have an excuse for not sweeping up all of my sawdust… or maybe I should just keep a tin of it somewhere handy.