oil

Let me start out by saying that we got a really great deal on this house…

When we were looking at houses, I was primarily looking at single story houses, but there weren’t that many that had a big yard, and I really wanted a big yard for my kids and our dog. This one came on the market the night before we were going to tour houses on our list that met most of our criteria. Our realtor was able to get us an appointment to come in and look at it the next day. Even though it was two story, the back yard was exactly what I was looking for, and there was a huge loft upstairs that could be used as a play room, so… we put in an offer and they accepted it!

However… we had a lot of work to do. And one of the things I noticed when I was putting decorations on top of the kitchen cabinets was the layer upon layer of dust… yuck!

But… we’ve been a little busy working, taking care of the kids, and getting everything else around the house in order that this cleanup was left for later.

Now that the painters are almost done, and I can finally put things back in their cabinets, and I had to get up on top of the counter to pull down the glass dishes to put back where they go, I knew I had to just get up there and get it done.

Cleaning isn’t on the top of my list of fun things to do. And cleaning other people’s mess is definitely on my list of things that I prefer not to do. But, we’ve been in this house 7 months now, so… I got up there to get it done.

I first tried to clean with one of the scrubby cloths from Norwex with just water… it didn’t clean up the grime. So… I added dish soap, not Dawn… we like to think of Costco as our grocery store, so we use the Kirkland Dish soap. It would start to get the layers off, but I’d have to climb off the counter to keep rinsing the cloth because it was getting covered in the grime rolls. Plus, there was the little accent that also had dust in it. So… I went upstairs to grab this scrub brush we had, and looked up ways to clean grime off cabinets and decided to try White Vinegar. I used a Norwex Envirocloth with the vinegar and it was working, until the cloth would get coated in grime, then it was just spreading it around. So I started using the scrubby brush with vinegar, until the scrubby brush was covered in grime, and I’d have to get down to wash the brush. The dish soap did great at cleaning the grime off the brush, so I made a combo mixto, mixto combo with Vinegar and Dish soap. That seemed to get a lot of the grime off, but still left the bottom sticky later.. and I did have to keep climbing down to wash off my brush.

The recipe I found that I loved for getting the last layer of grime off was vegetable oil and baking soda. You use one part vegetable oil and 2 parts baking soda. And you just put it on and rub it off with paper towels. I probably went through an entire roll of paper towels, but I got to make much fewer trips off the counter to wash out bowls and brushes and cloths, since I could just throw away the dirty paper towels.

I thought I may be able to skip the vinegar and dish soap step, but the vegetable oil and baking soda alone didn’t do a good job of taking off all the layers of grime.

So… my best combo for cleaning the remaining shelves was to mix vinegar with dish soap, scrub scrub scrub most of the layers off with my scrub brush, then second pass was vegetable oil and baking soda with a paper towel, then I did one last clean up any leftover grime rolls from the corners with a bottle of plant enzyme spray cleaner and a paper towel.

It’s not perfect, but it’s so much better than it used to be. I’m probably going to be really sore tomorrow, but I’m so glad that this is done!

Here are before and afters…

To see it done MUCH faster than it actually took… watch it here!