Learning the hard way

I am that person who seems to always need to learn things, well, the hard way.

You know, things like when you forget to put a mug under the spout on the Keurig, the stand below the mug holds EXACTLY the same amount of fluid as the largest cup of coffee you can brew, and that removing and emptying it is tricky, and you WILL end up mopping coffee up off the floor and the counters. It’s a given.

Or, you cannot drain a 2 lb. box of cooked spaghetti noodles by holding the lid of the pot over the pot and “catching” the noodles before they fall out. You end up with the whole mess sitting in the bottom of the sink. You’ve done that right? Right?

So, today’s lesson…

When I bought my house 3 months ago, I was delighted that it had a nice sandstone colored ceramic tile floor – something I’d always wanted. And I was especially delighted with the brown color-matched grout – which turned out to be not color matched grout, but GRUNGE. I have used Krud Cutter, toilet bowl cleaner, Fantastik, and Formula 409, all of which do an *okay* job. I have used Scrubbing Bubbles Foaming Bleach which did an excellent job, but it’s pretty expensive and will take more than the 2 bottles I have to clean such a huge floor. I tried Barkeeper’s Friend for Stone and Granite and it did an amazing job as well but, again, too expensive and will take more than the 2 bottles also.

So, I bought a 5 lb. box of OxyClean. I love this stuff – it cleaned a 10 year old red wine stain out of a white carpet, and it keeps my whites really bright without having to use bleach, which breaks down the fabric. OxyClean is guaranteed to clean anything *organic.”

So, dirt and floor crud is organic, right? Also, and this is important here, OxyClean is activated best by warm or hot water. Now, my mom didn’t raise an idiot (wait for it…), so I read the label to see if there was anything on it about cleaning grout.

Some pertinent highlights from the instructions/directions:

– “OxyClean works best in warm to hot water. “

– “Use four scoops per gallon of water. Note: for some surfaces, like grout, a more concentrated solution/paste may be used.”

So, if we do the math, four scoops per gallon equates to one scoop per quart. A quart is 32 ounces. If my **spray bottle** holds 24 ounces and a more concentrated solution can be used, and because the grout is almost BLACK with crud, I’m good, right? Right.

So, I carefully (using a funnel, because I’m smart, right?) pour in one scoop of OxiClean while running the hot water in the kitchen sink to get it good and hot, because it works best in hot or warm water. Check.

I slowly fill the bottle to the halfway mark, swirl the hot water around to get the powder mixing in, which works quite well. I finish filling the bottle to the “max fill” line, put the spray tube and nozzle on the bottle and prepare to do battle with the grout. I shake the bottle vigorously to ensure the OxiClean has dissolved completely.

As I turn away from the sink, liquid starts shooting out of the nozzle in the spray bottle – the hot water has DEFINITELY activated the OxiClean, and I quick aim it at the floor figuring I can just outline the grout with the liquid coming out of the nozzle and, bonus, I don’t have to keep squeezing that trigger!

Except…it’s coming out really fast and furious and I can’t control where it’s going. I quickly stepped to the sink and held the bottle with the nozzle pointing into the sink and loosened the cap a bit. I heart “pffffffffffft” as the pressure inside the spray bottle was released and thought, well, I can leave this cap loosened a bit, and still spray. So, I did.

I let the solution sit for 20 minutes and, when I went back to the kitchen I could see that much of the solution had dried to a white film – in the grout, on the tiles, on the cabinets, all over the sink and counter…everywhere that sputtering nozzle had been aimed.

I mopped up the floor and wiped out the grout (which looks AWESOME, by the way), made sure the cap on that spray bottle was loose, and set it on the counter, and promised myself I’d do round 2 in the morning.

This morning when I walked into the kitchen, my jaw hit the floor. It looked like someone had dropped a cocaine bomb at, in and near my kitchen sink. There was white powdery residue all over the counter at the back of the sink and off to the right of the sink. The faucet was COATED in the stuff, and the B-L-A-C-K sink looked like it had been pained in it. As if that wasn’t enough, the floor was also coated where I’d only half-assed wiped up the stuff from the night before. The cupboards showed a large area of white residue as well, and the BLACK dishwasher sat covered in white, mocking me.

That GD spray bottle had apparently built up pressure again and spewed…again. There was less than 4 ounces of fluid left in the bottle. The rest was…everywhere else!

Have you ever spilled a cup of coffee or a glass of milk? It seems like that 8 or 10 oz cup actually contained a gallon right? Yeah, well, if you were to see my kitchen this morning, you’d think someone had hooked up a fire hose to a water truck and sprayed white shit all over my kitchen.

Six times now I have had to go out in the kitchen and wipe down this shit – because I have to wait for it to dry to see where I missed. I believe I will be busy cleaning this stuff up for the foreseeable future.

So…what happened? Well, I went back to the OxyClean container because, when all else fails, read the instructions, right?

There’s an asterisk at the bottom of the container that says “When creating a solution, mix until completely dissolved. Use warmest water possible. Do not heat or boil.”

The last sentence of that, which I SWEAR was not on that container last night? “Do not mix/store solution in a sealed container.”

Ooof.