A Slice of Life: A Little BS (Baking soda, that is)

Being a Pinterest user, I've read a lot about all the different things baking soda can do. But aside from making "volcanoes" in elementary school (was that anyone else's science project year after year?) and using it to bake things, I had never experienced the powers of humble baking soda for myself. Until today.

This sounds dramatic...because it was. A dramatic transformation, at least.

We live in an apartment built circa 1960. For the most part, we really like it, but some parts show the age. Like the dryer, for instance, in which we could not find the lint trap for quite a while. (Apparently, neither could the last tenant. When we finally located the lint trap, there were about 3 inches of lint built up on it. I'm not sure how the place had not burst into flames before our arrival.)

Another place that shows a little aging is the kitchen counters (oh, that lovely off-white laminate). While we've added a few red wine stains ourselves, there were a lot of stains already present when we moved in. Judging from those and some similar ones on the white cabinets, we have concluded that the previous tenant can only have been a very violent stir-fryer.

After we got another wine stain on the counter last night (I guess we're not very neat pourers), I looked up how to get red wine off of counters. After wading through all the instructions for granite countertops (ha), I finally found a suggestion that just used baking soda and water. Seemed simple enough, but I was skeptical.

Here's a "before" pic of our counter beside the sink. This is after several past vigorous scrubbings with Lysol, vinegar, etc.

Kind of blurry, but you get the gist. Lovely, no?

I mixed baking soda and water into a "toothpaste" consistency, applied it to the counter, and rubbed it all around with a scrubby sponge. Our counter was so bad that I just applied it liberally with a spoon to the entire surface, but it would be easy to spot-clean one stain.

Yum.

After 5-10 minutes of scrubbing...behold!

Oh dang.

I had to use quite a lot of "elbow grease" for this, but I won't complain about getting an extra upper body workout. Plus, if you try this at home, your counters probably aren't as old and gross as mine. So don't worry. :)

I'm pretty sure this is also the concoction I've seen recommended to whiten your teeth. If you're into multitasking, you can remove stains from your kitchen and your teeth all in one go...

Let's just look at that one more time.