{DIY} Vinegar + Steel Wool Stained Crate

I have always had an affinity for old things. I'm terribly at yoga-style meditation, but find a sort of silence, calm and peace from perusing the aisles of antique and thrift stores in search of secondhand stories. Several years ago, I bought an antique crate from the 1800s. My Dad helped me frame it up and turn it into the most amazing piece of furniture I own.

Alas, with the rise of Pinterest, vintage crates are in high demand these days. (And I can't quite bring myself to budget hundreds of dollars for wooden boxes.) Thankfully, I recently discovered a solution. (Quite literally -- a solution.)

The recipe is simple and uses two items you probably have in your home right now: white vinegar and steel wool. (You can also go further down the exploratory rabbit hole by adding tea bags to the mix.) There are hundreds of posts that share the how/what in great detail (here's a great one), so I'm going to provide the readers digest version.

1. Get something made of wood. In my case, a $10 pine crate from Michael's. You may want to lightly sand to get rid of any sticker goo or waxy coating. 2. Add white vinegar to a sealable jar. 3. Add a puff of steel wool to the vinegar in the jar. 4. Wait 48+ hours. (Longer seems to be better. I forgot about mine, went on vacation and came back two weeks later. Results will vary based on time of "soaking" and type of wood. The photos you're seeing in this post are the product of NO tea and two-week-old stain.) 5. (Optional) Steep some black tea and apply to wood item. The tannins the tea adds to the wood will supposedly alter the color, resulting in a "blacker" look. 6. Tarp off your area. (This stain will stain anything it touches, including concrete!) Apply your stain using a sponge brush.* 7. Marvel at how virgin wood is instantly transformed and takes on the appearance of some marvelous relic that has been hanging out in a barn for the last 80 years.

*I found I achieved the best results when swabbing on semi-haphazardly. You don't want this to look like a perfect paint job. You want it to take on the look of some history. I did a rough swab job, allowed drips to remain, applied additional layers, etc. This is one of those projects that seems to suggest the less strategy, the better the outcome.

Here's where I started... 

Here's where I ended up... 

Tub cleaner + carpet spot remover (DIY)

Writer Sylvia Plath once said, "There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them." As a nightly bath taker, I'm inclined to agree. As a nightly bath taker, I'm also intimately familiar with the nightmare that is soap scum and hard water stains. In fact, the ring of doom and I are in a bit of a cold war. And I've tried everything short of nuclear weaponry to help me win the battle. From bleach sprays to organic sprays, caustic powders to baking soda scrubs -- nothing seems to work.

Until last night.

The thing that finally did the trick was a DIY recipe floating around the interwebs. It uses only two ingredients, both of which cost less than $5 combined...and are probably already residing in that creepy cabinet under your kitchen sink. White vinegar + blue Dawn dish soap.

I am not sure what kind of magic they put in blue Dawn, but holy moly, I am a believer! When it pairs with white vinegar some kind of magical love connection ensues...and now I will share it with you.

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KICKASS TUB + TILE CLEANER

RECIPE 1 part blue Dawn dish soap to 1 part white vinegar.

INSTRUCTIONS Put ingredients in a spray bottle and shake well before using. (Some recipes suggest heating the vinegar first for added oomph.) Spray mixture onto tub (be sure to thoroughly coat any extra grimy or gross spots.) Leave on for 15 minutes and rinse. More than likely you won't even have to work up a sweat with a scrub brush, especially if you use this mixture routinely moving forward.

PROS: amazingly effective - works better than any commercial cleaners I have tried, semi-natural, inexpensive, Dawn saves wildlife, uses ingredients you probably already have around the house

CONS: Takes a little more effort to rinse than some cleaners, but the viscosity it part of what makes it effective. Definitely has a soapy vinegar aroma, but I far prefer "soap pickles" to the scent of chemical cleaners.

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DIY CARPET SPOT REMOVER

As it turns out, the super powers of vinegar and blue Dawn don't stop at the bathroom. At least not IN the bathroom. As the proud pet parent of a rescue dog, I can honestly say there are few things on Earth I love more than Rocky. I mean, just look at that face...

Don't let the look deceive you. He's 80% adorable lovehound, 20% terror. And while he's pretty much a genius, every now and then he tips into evil genius territory (occasionally just-plain-evil). I was reminded of this last week when I started moving furniture and discovered someone had peed on the leg of chair in the living room, which had pooled under the foot on the carpet below. Initial efforts to remove the spot with my Little Green Machine proved fruitless, so I did what any normal person would do: I ordered a full-size carpet cleaner at 2 a.m. on Amazon. (It's actually pretty great.)

But I knew I'd need a spot treatment if there was a chance of getting the stain out.

While perusing Youtube for vinegar + Dawn bathroom results, I noticed that someone had recommended vinegar and Dawn as a carpet spot treatment for such purposes.

Could it be? 

Yes. It could totally be. I wish I had taken before and after photos to share. I have no idea how long that stain had been setting into my carpet, but with just a spray and blot it was barely noticable. A pass of the carpet cleaner and things were good as new.

RECIPE 1 part blue Dawn dish soap to 2 parts white vinegar

INSTRUCTIONS Spray on stain, allow to set for a minute, blot. Note: I would definitely suggest spot testing this on an inconspicuous area of your carpet before you go spraying it all over the place. While my carpeting is light, I do not have natural carpet fibers. The mixture definitely comes out blue, so use at your own risk.

Happy cleaning!

How a woman named Thelma changed my views on marketing...and helped me clean up my act.

When I was little and we would leave a restaurant, two things would inevitably happen. My dad would pop a red-and-white peppermint in his mouth before we had hit the door, and as soon as we climbed in the car my mom would roll down the window, gasping for fresh air. I always liked the smell of mint so I never understood her aversion, but the day I walked face-first into a friend's vanilla candle-laden home, it all started to make sense. I felt like someone had smeared my nose in a cupcake. And while I love a cupcake just as much as the next girl, I'd rank artificial cupcake scent somewhere between "wet dog" and "dorito feet" on the olfactory offensiveness scale.

Among all the wonderful things I inherited from my mother, it seems  I also inherited her acute sense of smell.

Which is precisely what inspired my first purchase of Mrs. Meyers hand soap. Actually, that's not true. The design drew me in, the scent sold me. I'd like to say "the rest is history" (because that would make for an epically succinct blog post), but it wasn't so. That afternoon, standing in the soap aisle at Target, was just the beginning of a true love story about to unfold.

There aren't a lot of brands I'd profess to love. Even fewer I would say make me feel giddy with joy. Mrs. Meyers is both of those and more. And as someone who so feels enraged over paying $12 for a pack of toilet paper that she has to text her sister to express said anger from the store, pledging allegiance to a $4 bottle of hand soap is kind of a big deal.

Months after becoming a Mrs. Meyers fan, I finally moseyed over to mrsmeyers.com to check out Thelma's website...only to discover a mecca of marketing excellence. (I'm only sort of joking when I say I tiny digital branding and identity angels descended on my screen...)

Beautiful, clean, on-brand site design! Amazing execution of brand storytelling! A tagline that integrates the phrase "like the dickens!"

And that's when the music began. 

Had I found the Holy Grail of  marketing done right?

So here we are. You be the reader, I'll be the writer. And we'll spend the next couple weeks worth of blog posts taking a look at a company that is more than just another pretty smell.

Cupcake huffers need not apply.