Do we "use" commonsense knowledge? If yes, "how"?

Suppose I ask you to imagine - A man is drinking juice and for some reason some of it spills out from the glass onto his shirt. What will you imagine? You will imagine that a man is trying to drink juice by putting the glass to his mouth,and for some reason some of it falls down onto his shirt and gets absorbed in it (the shirt gets wet). Now try to break this imagination into steps. Step 1 - Trying to drink juice 2. Some of it falls down 3. Comes near the shirt 4. Gets absorbed in the shirt (shirt becomes wet). 

The question is - how did you go from step 3 to step 4? That is, how did you infer that the juice which came near the shirt got absorbed in it? You would say, I used the commonsense knowledge that when liquids fall on cloths/clothes they get absorbed in the latter. But the question that arises is that at step 3 you obviously didn't know that the juice is absorbed in the shirt. How on earth did you get motivated to think about 'juices being liquid' as their only property from amongst the multitude of possibilities of their other properties when there was no particular motivation for the same? So the question is - did some part of your mind actually go through that step (juices being liquids) in the "forward" fashion i.e. while going in the forward direction of thinking?

You can't even say this - at step 3 there is the sight of a pant nearby - something impending. So there is a sort of a search that runs in the mind that "look for those properties of juices which include clothes in them (for a potential result)", because then the question arises again that how did you think of only the property of a pant being made of cloth amongst its many other properties when there was no particular motivation to think of it?

Or is it so - "think of some piece of commonsense knowledge (or knowledge) which includes a property of a juice and a property of what's nearby (impending) i.e. a pant"?

How does commonsense knowledge REALLY get used?