Peggy Gets Her Clean On

 Hello Internets! This post is super late because I've spent the week getting ready for Mademoiselle's birthday and have been up to my eyeballs in Fancy Nancy paraphernalia! I have this problem where I throw these huge and ridiculous birthday parties for my kids--I love doing it and they love the attention and their friends love the gift bags and everyone wins! But that's a post for another day!

Where I am in Utah it is FINALLY getting warmer which means I'm starting to get the itch. You know when the weather warms up and you can open your windows (and worry that now everyone passing by will hear you yell at your kids...what? Just me?) and wear short sleeved shirts and roll the car windows down when you're driving around town and you can have lunch in the park...ah Spring! It's also the time of the year when I think, "Okay, um, yikes. My house is disgusting." So I decided this week I am going to try out some of the handy Spring Cleaning helps you find on Pinterest! Now, I'm trusting this is a judgement-free zone. While I purposefully let one area get really gross to test the pin, my baseboards are really and truly revolting. I keep hinting to the Boy that it would be super great for Mother's Day to have someone come in and do my Spring Cleaning FOR me but he's never quite caught it. (Ahem! Cough cough!) So the moral of the story is, don't judge. I don't claim to be an amazing Supermom who has it all together. I'd MUCH rather play with my kids than scrub baseboards, although after actually photographing these bad boys, I think I'm fixing to repent of that sin.

Confession time over. On with the pins! So I tried 3 of them--here's the first one.

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I hate cleaning my baseboards and this pin sounded so wonderful! Just wipe those puppies clean with a dryer sheet and they smell good and the dirt and dog and cat hair gets repelled and every day you'll wake up to angels singing and birds chirping! (I added the last couple of parts) So I got my dryer sheets..

and I found my most disgusting baseboards..(make sure you're not eating anything before looking at this)

GAAAAA!! Did I seriously just post this on the Internet? 

My grandmother would be SO disappointed in me!

And started wiping with, believe you me, a fervor in my heart! This is what happened:

Not much. It dusted all the dust off but didn't clean the...I don't even know what that is. I scrubbed and scrubbed and it didn't actually CLEAN it. Now, in this pin's defense...my baseboards are a special kind of disgusting. It's possible I suppose that if you START with clean baseboards, the stuff from the dryer sheet will in fact REPEL the dust and pet hair but I'll tell you that for me for the purpose of actually cleaning my baseboards, this pin was unfortunately a fail. Sigh. I saw another pin that said you could use Scrubbing Bubbles to clean baseboards, but I much prefer the smell of Pine-Sol so I'll stick to that. I need my kids to do something naughty so I can punish them with some baseboard scrubbing! Moving on...

Have you seen this delightful little trick?

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Word on the Boards (the Pinterest boards that is) is that if you rub wax paper on a chrome faucet, it'll repel water spots which means you have to wipe them down less often. What? Less housework? Pick me! So I gave it a shot...this is what my faucets LOOKED like (again, I cannot believe I'm putting this out there for the world to see!)

I wiped that bad boy down, shined it nice and pretty and rubbed it down with wax paper

This is what it looked like the next day..

Water spots! Boo! Okay, so not a TON of water spots, but not few enough to encourage me to rub my faucet down with wax paper every other day. This isn't a huge deal for me (unlike the baseboard thing) because I've been "flywashed" by the Flylady  I'm pretty used to shining my sink every day when I do the dishes. Still, dang! I wish it would have worked. At this point, if you're keeping track, I'm 0 for 2. But don't you fear...drum roll please!

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Have you seen this one floating around? The magic tub cleaner? I've also seen it called a "Blessing in a Bottle." So according to the instructions, you warm the vinegar and add the dishsoap and put it in a spray bottle. (I have to confess I skipped the warming step and just mixed it up...we've discussed my propensity for laziness, yes?) You spray it on your shower, wait 1-2 hours and wipe it off. Tada! Okay, well, I didn't spray it on my shower although I think I will probably do that this week-ish. What I DID do, though, is use it to clean my stove. This is what I let get dirty on purpose. I didn't clean it for an entire week so it got good and gross. (You're not judging, are you? If you are, stop it!) This is what it looked like:

Ewwwww....so I got my stuff together

And mixed it up. I tripled the recipe and it was enough to fill my spray bottle.  I gave the stove a wipe and got all the crumbs and stuff off (shudder!) and sprayed it with the stuff.

I let it soak on there while I loaded the dishwasher so, about 20 minutes and then I started wiping it down. This was my first swipe:

Look how it cut right through that grime! Hooray! So I kept going..

I found a particularly gross part and took a go at it with the wash cloth...this part was more stubborn and required me to use my little nylon scrubby but I didn't break a sweat or anything. So then I thought that since I was "spring cleaning" I should take those burner things off and clean underneath those...

Okay, THAT needs to be done more frequently. Gag. But the Dawn cuts through the grease amazingly. This was the finished result:

Shiny! Pretty! I was so stoked I used it to clean the front of my microwave (that is above the stove so it gets pretty greasy) and it was awesome. This stuff really IS amazing!! PIN WIN!! So I ended up 1 for 3. I guess it could be worse but hey, I got some Spring Cleaning done so everyone wins. This week I'm going to make a Mother's Day gift! Are you just super excited?? Control yourself, Internets. It's just a blog. :o) Talk to you again soon!

P.S. If you have a pin you want me or Tay-Diggity to try out, send it to me! My pinterest username is jackjacksmom!