In a carpeted sea of blue/green polish

I feel compelled to blog my latest disaster and how I fixed it. Or, in my case, cleaned it up.

I'm going to start at the beginning making this a longer story than it really needs to be, but I feel as though I need to draw you into my story, make you care more about all of this than you actually should. I want you to experience my pain and live the tragedy with me. I need you to understand the miracle that has happened.

It all started with an idea to paint my toenails. Its not officially summer yet, but with temps in the high 80's it might as well be. I love my sandals and flip flops, but even the cutest sandal doesn't shine if you have nasty toenails. I like the french manicure look on toenails so that is what I set out to do, and succeeded nicely. I should have stopped there, but no, I decided little blue petal flowers would look awesome on both my big toes (and they do). Really though, I should have just kept my freshly painted piggies as they were.

I painted some cute flowers on and went to clean up my hoard of polish when the unthinkable happened. I dropped my pretty blue/green polish on the floor....while it was open! Did I mention the floor was carpeted? A light color of carpeting? Yeah, well it is. And not just the floor, but I also coated my Kindle which was laying there where I had placed it the night before after being too tired to properly put it away. Of course, the case was open in order to let the polish freely flow over the screen.

At this point most people would launch themselves out of the chair and pick up the polish as quickly as possible. My only problem was the polish was covering one of my feet as well. I didn't really want to make matters worse by making blue/green footprints all over my carpet. Of course, I didn't have a tissue near me so ended up trying to clean off my foot with little cotton cosmetic squares. Once I was able to step down on the floor it was too late to quickly grab the bottle to try and minimize the spill, so I went and got my camera instead. 

My Kindle was my first concern, and really the polish wiped right off the Kindle and case with no problems. The home screen button is a little sticky, but still functional. Once that was cleaned my next step was the carpet. My first thought was to just leave it alone. There is already a small stain of purple cough syrup and the colors went well together. It didn't happen in a high traffic area (its beside my bed) and really no one was going to notice anyway unless they were in my bedroom, on the far side of the bed. But hey, maybe I will be bedridden soon and will have company. While they will show their concern for me they wouldn't be able to stop staring at the floor, wondering what the heck I spilled on it, and why it was still there. I'd know they were thinking about it and they would know I knew even though both parties would be too polite to mention anything out loud. So my second thought was to pour nail polish remover on the stain and started blotting feverishly with a rag. All this did was start to spread the stain. O.K., time to look online. I can't be the only person out there who has done this, after all, this wasn't my first time either, although the other incident was in my childhood in my moms house with a bottle of red polish (sorry mom), and didn't really involve much carpet, only a few flung polish strings when I shook the bottle without making sure the lid was on tightly. So what did I find online? HAIRSPRAY and RUBBING ALCOHOL. What the heck? Really? Seriously? Yep, I looked several places. Regular hairspray and rubbing alcohol. And it worked.

So here is what you came for. How to do it. By now your feeling my pain, and if you are reading this because you just spilled your bottle, its ok. I found it works better when the polish is dry. You can kinda scrape off the excess polish with a dull table knife. Not too hard, you don't want a bald spot in your carpet. Then just liberally spray the spot with hairspray, dump on some rubbing alcohol and start to blot the stain. I added a little warm water in the mix. Keep blotting, try not to scrub back and forth because you might spread the stain at first. Once most of it was gone I did some back and forth scrubbing, but not much. Seriously, the stain just lifted right before my eyes! A MIRACLE has occurred! Now, Acetone or polish remover may have done the trick eventually, but I also read it could eat the backing of your carpet away, or melt it. So yeah, lets keep the disasters to a minimum. You can still see a little bit of the stain, but I gave up pretty quickly on it. I really didn't spend much time scrubbing, and I really don't care that I can still see a spot when I look very closely. I won't have to worry when I am bedridden that someone might see it unless they are studying the carpet closely, probably wondering what the purple cough syrup stain is. 

Before

After

Shabby Sheik on a Dime

I posted this on Facebook and was rather surprised at the amount of likes and comments I got, so I figured I would blog. I haven't blogged about anything in a long time now. I didn't forget about this blog, and I've had plenty I could be blogging about. I'm not sure what the deal is, but I will try to do better, but I digress.

I don't own the house I am currently living in and we have always known we would not be living here forever. We also know that this house will be torn down eventually and the owner really isn't into fixing things up or updating anything. We did a lot of work when we first moved in to make it livable while trying not to really work too hard on something we won't enjoy for years to come. Most things are done as cheaply as possible and as easy as possible. Enter my kitchen counters. O.K., not counterS, just one counter. I could really go into a huge diatribe about the kitchen here, but I would lose a lot of people along the way. After all, why should you really care about my kitchen. What you may care about is your kitchen, and your counter, or if you are lucky, counterS.

My counter did match the rest of the colors in the kitchen when we moved in, and if this was the 70's I probably would have loved it. However, the mustard color is just not for me. Now, you can paint formica counters, but that was more time consuming than I was willing to do. Enter my bright idea, contact paper or shelf paper. I didn't take any step by step pictures, because I didn't plan on blogging about this, and I didn't think there would be so many questions about it. It's pretty self explanatory anyway. Clean your counters to remove any grease and dirt, stick contact paper on, smooth out any bubbles with your hand and you're done. I lay a full sheet across the sink and after sticking it down I cut around the edge with a box knife. Easy. Peasy.

I did do this before on this counter and it's held up for at least 5 years of regular kitchen counter stuff. Don't put anything hot on it and don't use it as a cutting board and you shouldn't have any problems. I've cleaned mine with all types of cleaning solution, had the sink flood all over them and had several kool-aid related spills without staining. Even if you mess up a space simply peel it up and stick a new piece down.

Before.

And after. 

Pitcher added for design appeal. 

Next I must do something about that wall.... :)