What Can Peroxide And Baking Soda Do? This!

Our best friends from our home town will be moving to Nashville this weekend.  Finally!  After many starts and set backs.  It's been an ordeal.  They had rented a condo 1.6 miles from us which we cleaned and scrubbed spic and span.  There was a major water leak before they moved in, things raveled apart and we had to find them another place to live stat!  That was the down side.  The up side is they now will live 1.6 blocks from us!  That's right!  We can walk back and forth to each other's abodes.  How awesome is that!  We are all super pumped!!

In the interim, there have been many things to deal with.  They are trying to get everything packed, Jeff is finishing up his job, which leaves Tonya to do many of the other things necessary for arranging a major move.  She has had to make several quick trips down here to take care of condo hell.  And then there was finding a new place.  Dan and I were the scouts.  When we found this place, that was another trip down to approve it.  Each one of those trips was one less day spent packing.  Makes you not want to get up in the morning sometimes.

However, the new place is a nice town house condominium which they are going to enjoy a lot!  Like most places, it needed some good old cleaning.  Dan and I volunteered to do said job for them because it was not going to get done before the move otherwise.

These condominiums were built in the 70's, but most of them have been updated maybe several times.  The biggest problem I encountered were orange rust stains in the bathtub and unknown stains on the cultured marble sinks.  Ugh.  I don't know about you, but rust stains gross me out.  Even if the fixture is clean, it doesn't look clean.  The previous occupants were evidently not bothered by said stains because they had done nothing to fix the issue.  Plain old bathtub cleaner was NOT doing the trick.  So, I went on Google and looked for solutions by typing in "stain removal bathtubs".  The tub is porcelain, so EHow said to use at least 3% peroxide and baking soda.  Okay, why not give it a try?  They are both super cheap so I was more than willing to see what happened.

Well, this is what happened!

It was a complete miracle as far as I am concerned.  Who knows how old those rust stains were?  There were stains on the other end of the tub also, like something metal had gotten wet and left rusty marks in the tub and all around the edges.   Quite a few of them which made the tub look terrible.  All I did was sprinkle them with some baking soda and pour a little hydrogen peroxide over the baking soda to make a paste.  I let it sit for about 15 minutes and started scrubbing with a micro fiber cleaning cloth.  I could NOT believe by eyes when that stain just absolutely disappeared.  Wow!  No more expensive chemicals for me!  I'll take $.97 cent hydrogen peroxide and $.99 cent baking soda any day of the week and there is nothing toxic in either of them, just don't drink the peroxide.

The sink in the downstairs half bath had some serious stains.  The sink is cultured marble and the EHow article said the peroxide/baking soda mixture was safe to use, but do not use bleach.  The sink looked like someone had washed paint brushes in it or something and just left it and it had stained the sink.  It looked really ugly.  One stain was an off white (upper left) and the other was black (middle front).

 I didn't want Tonya and Jeff to have to live with these ugly stains that made the sink look totally unclean.  The EHow article said to soak a soft cloth in at least 3% peroxide and let it lay on the stains as long as overnight.  I did it for about 20 minutes.  Then, I sprinkled on the baking soda and added enough peroxide to make a paste.  Using the micro fiber cleaning cloth, I started to scrub.  As the paste soaked into the cloth and sort of disappeared, I rinsed the cloth and put more baking soda and peroxide on the stains.  I did this 3 times.  And this is the final result.

Another miracle.  Bye bye stains!  It looks totally renewed!  The black and off white stains are gone.  The cultured marble does have natural color variations in it, but those ugly "whatever they were" stains are gone, gone, gone.  I was one happy camper and I know Tonya and Jeff will be too.

Now, I am super stoked to try this method on lots of hard to clean stains.  We could save ourselves so much money and toxic exposure to chemicals by using these inexpensive ingredients.  I love Google.  Thanks EHow for the handy dandy tips!  Give this a try the next time you need a cleaning miracle because it truly works.

Everyday Donna

Things to Remember:

If you type in hydrogen peroxide in Google search, there are many web sites touting all the uses for hydrogen peroxide.  Check them out the next time you need a good stain remover!  donna