Homemade Carpet Cleaner: Dawn + Peroxide

     There are about 1000 posts about this on pinterest. I'm actually not sure where it even originated. I read about it a few weeks back and I've tried it several times on same vague grease and dirt spots where we have heavy foot traffic in the living room. So far I've had good results.

   Well, I've been working on getting our bedroom de-cluttered. (Not my favorite.) We switched with the girl's last year. There are some lovely leftover stains from their (unauthorized) acrylic paint art project. After trying some regular carpet cleaners, including Resolve and Nature's Miracle with massive spots still leftover I gave up. I hadn't gotten back around to it until now. Mind you, they got into my stash. They emptied multiple 2oz bottles of the stuff in shades of brown, white, and green in soupy globs all over the floor (and their little table, some toys, and the crib). It came off almost everything plastic and wooden ok since I got right to it but after getting up as much as I possibly could I assumed there would be a paint stain forever on the carpet.

    Not that I cared that much . . . it's the cheapest carpet available on this planet and we're in a rental. Anyway, it's still unsightly.

So here's what my results looked like:

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Not bad. There's definitely still some discoloration but it is much, much better. The green spot there near the top was actually from a spot of permanent marker. Yummy. I bet I could go over it again just one more time and you wouldn't be able to tell it was there.


So here's the recipe breakdown:

Hot water . . . however much it takes to fill that standard red mop bucket almost halfway.
Dawn . . . 4-5 good spins into the bucket while the water was running.
Baking Soda . . . just a few teaspoons dashed across the top
Hydrogen Peroxide . . . the kind in the dark brownish black bottle, maybe 1/4 cup

I used one of my handy dandy flat diapers and with a little bit of effort it obviously did what other cleaners couldn't quite manage. The water was definitely brown and gross looking by the time I was done with that area and a few other spots.


Next up: the chocolate syrup stain in the hallway.

Yeah, we'll see how that goes.

Fingerpainting Pinterest Craft!

This was FUN. And, it was EASY.

Here is the original.

I didn't use canvas or regular finger paint. We used crayola color wonder paper and finger paint.

I fixed up letters with blue painter's tape and put that over the paper then just let them have at it. A spare piece of cardboard I keep for things like this meant I didn't even need to wipe up the floor (much).




 Notice the cute toes of an eager toddler. I frustrate her muchly when I'm trying to get pictures of anything like this. She's always ready to get on with it!

 I barely let it dry for 10 seconds before taking the paint off. The nice thing about the crayola paint stuff is that it doesn't really drip and it dries fast anyway.

FIN!

It's kind of adorable. I didn't get any pictures of the actual painting, sadly. They need some serious refereeing when it comes to art and craft supplies. If I could just give them an empty white room and all the paint, markers, and crayons imaginable there'd likely be no space untouched. Think the inside of Rapunzel's tower in Tangled. haha Definitely . . . .

So there you have it! I'll either frame it for their room or put it in the "keep" folder for the kid-art scrapbook I honestly intend to put together someday.