While He Was Napping

momma gets stuff done

  • Home
  • About
  • Archive
  • Do It Yourself
    • Crafts
      • No Sew
      • Painting
      • Paper Crafts
      • Repurpose Projects
      • Vinyl
      • Washi Tape
      • Kid’s Crafts
      • Fonts
    • Sewing
    • Decorate
      • Home Decor
      • Holiday Decor
    • Celebrate
      • DIY Gifts
      • DIY Your Party
  • Recipes
    • Beverages
    • Appetizer
      • Bread
      • Other Appetizers
    • Snacks
    • Main Dish
      • Meat
        • Chicken
        • Beef
        • Pork
        • Seafood
      • Vegetarian
      • Slow Cooker
      • 30 Minute Meals
    • Dips & Sauces
    • Salads
    • Pasta
    • Soup
    • Dessert
      • Cookies
      • Brownies
      • Cupcakes and Cake
      • Box Mix Recipes
      • Other Sweet Treats
    • Breakfast Food
      • Pancakes
      • Waffles
      • Muffins
      • Other Breakfast Food
  • Family
    • Babies
      • Pregnancy
      • Newborns
      • The 1st Year
    • Toddlers
    • Preschoolers
    • Kindergartners
    • 6-8 Year Olds
    • The Grown Ups
      • Date Night
      • Romantic Gifts
    • Self Care
  • For the Home
    • Cleaning
    • Organizing
    • Emergency Preparedness
  • Travel
    • Travel Tricks & Tips
    • Traveling with Kids
  • Tech & Gadgets
    • Must-Have Apps
    • Techy Home Appliances
    • Gadgets & Electronics
    • Blogging Tips
  • Printables
    • Posters
      • Quote Printables
      • Subway Art Printables
    • Printable Organizers
    • Printable Journals
    • Learning Printables & Worksheets
    • LDS Printables
  • Holidays
    • New Year’s
    • Valentine’s Day
    • St. Patrick’s Day
    • Easter
    • Cinco de Mayo
    • Mother’s Day
    • Father’s Day
    • 4th of July
    • Back to School
    • Halloween
    • Thanksgiving
    • Christmas
    • Holiday & Seasonal Printables

March 23, 2015 by Krista

My Beautiful Mess

This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #SweepTheMess #CollectiveBias

Wanna know what my life is really like?  Behind the home page, painstakingly-written blog posts and carefully styled photos with just the right light?  My life is messy.  Utter and constant chaos.  Can you relate?  Is your life messy too?  Your messes may not be the same as mine, but I’m sure that things sometimes get a little chaotic and disorganized for you too.  That’s just life.  With three little boys, my life often seems like a never-ending span of messes amid a whirlwind of energetic boys that I can only pretend to keep up with.

O-Cedar Beauty in the Mess Cake

My real life is often full of blurry photos of boys I just can’t keep up with in less-than-ideal lighting because they don’t always do the cute stuff when the sun is streaming through the window.

Here is something I don’t often admit, at least not out loud.  I often get discouraged by the turmoil.  I wish I were better at keeping my family organized.  I am always looking for ways to tame the chaos, new methods and systems to try.  But, truth be told, my house does not look like a spread in a magazine.  And it probably never will.  In photos I take for my blog, there are all kinds of clutter and chaos just outside the frame.  It’s all staged.  My real life is a never-ending cycle: if the floors are vacuumed, there’s a mountain of dishes waiting to be done.  The sink is actually empty?  Well, you can bet there’s enough laundry to clothe a small village needing to be tended to.  The last load of laundry is finally in the washer… wait, is there such a thing as the “last load of laundry”?!  Don’t get me wrong, I do clean.  I clean ALL.  THE.  TIME.  My house is just never all clean, all at one time.  See why I get discouraged?

O-Cedar Beauty in the Mess Toys

He was supposed to be napping… I have no idea how he made such a mess and I didn’t hear a thing. Apparently, it was tiring work though.

 

Over the years, I have found little things that help.  A load of dishes a day, for instance, helps keep the counters clear.  Which, in turn, makes it easier to complete meal prep.  A load of laundry a day, even if it doesn’t always (or ever) get folded and put away, keeps everyone in mostly clean clothes…  There are the occasional days we get to the store and I realize there’s spaghetti sauce on my toddler’s pants… whoops.  And a sweep (or two or three) of the kitchen every day makes it look so much cleaner than it really is.  Bonus: it keeps odd choking hazards out of the baby’s mouth.  Baby N is in the stage of taste-testing every speck and spot he can manage to get his hands on.  Whether we are cutting hair, doing science experiments or art projects, a clean floor is one thing I need to stay on top of, for the safety of my family.  Good products that I can trust make the mundane and monotonous part of my life a little less so, or at least help it pass more quickly.  Flour sack dish cloths to dry the dishes, my DIY laundry basket dresser to help me contain the laundry explosion, and, most recently, the O-Cedar Angler Broom to help me quickly and efficiently clean the floors are some of my very favorite, can’t-live-without items that I use everyday.

O-Cedar Beautiful Mess

Here’s one more secret.  When I’m feeling discouraged about our chaos, I just have to do is look at my children.  I mean really look.  Not at their dirty faces and the mischief they are causing, but at how they are learning and exploring their world.  I have to look past the disarray to find just how amazing and beautiful this parenting thing really is.  Sure, I’m angry that every single toy has been pulled off their shelves, but when Little J tells me about how his Angry Bird cars had a race with the Thomas trains and the Dusty Crophopper airplane had to save Spider-Man before the dinosaurs could eat him, it suddenly becomes more than just too many toys all over the floor.  The magic of a three-year-old’s imagination is, indeed, beautiful.  The entire silverware basket from the last load of dishes I just ran through the dishwasher becomes a rowdy band as Baby N learns more about cause and effect… and sound.  Big J used an entire bag of marshmallows and half a box of toothpicks to create his marshmallow house masterpiece.  That sparkle in my sweet boys’ eyes when they master a new skill, or when that light bulb finally lights up, is amazing.  My life is a mess.  An adventurous, chaotic, sticky, slimy mess full of new discoveries and light bulb moments every day.  A beautiful mess.  My beautiful mess and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

O-Cedar Beauty in the Mess Science

 

Who doesn’t love to win?!  Try your luck and enter with the widget below!

0 Your Entries
0 Total Entries
Ended

Competition Not Found

Competition Not Found

Sorry, the Competition you are looking for no longer exists.

You may wish to contact the owner of this site about other Competitions.

Gleam LogoPowered by Gleam

And if you need something to do with all the dust and dirt while you wait for a winner to be chosen, check this out:

March 3, 2015 by Krista

Simplify Your Life With the Spring Cleaning Declutter Checklist

Has clutter come into your home since the holidays?  I know my house has seen an influx of “stuff”, and in completely honesty, my house wasn’t super clean before the holidays.  This year I am trying to focus more and be more productive.  But we are clutter keepers and it’s something I struggle with.  While it doesn’t create mental chaos, I hate having clutter all over and I hate being disorganized.  It makes it harder to focus!  If I was actually a quarter as organized as most people think I am, I would be so much better off.  Now, we don’t belong on an episode of Hoarders (unless you go in my bedroom, it’s the catch-all) and our home isn’t disgusting, but it absolutely is cluttered.  We have more stuff than we have room for.  And it is driving me CRAZY!  No one likes it when Momma goes cray-cray!

 

So I will be doing a 30 Day Declutter here on While He Was Napping starting the middle of the month or so.  However, if you’re antsy to do your own decluttering, you should hop on over to this post and print off your own Declutter Checklist.  It’s got a lot of the commonly overlooked areas, so you don’t forget anywhere and keep thinking “where the heck is all this stuff coming from?!”

Spring Cleaning Checklist

Obviously, decluttering isn’t a do it once and be done deal.  At least not at my house.  Stuff is always rotating – you just have to make sure your coming in ratio is equal to or smaller than the going out.  A big part of my problem is that I get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start.  The checklist has it all broken down by room.  Do you have 10 minutes?  Find an area that will take about that long and start there.  Some times it’s the little stuff that counts.  You may have a mountain of laundry on your bed, but the dishes are put away.  Give credit when it’s due and know that Ms. Scarlett O’Hare was so very right when she said “After all, tomorrow is another day.”

 

GET YOUR DECLUTTER CHECKLIST HERE

January 13, 2015 by Krista

10 Tips and Tricks for Getting Kids to Help Clean Up

I have been seeing tons of “age-appropriate chore” lists and cleaning schedules and ‘how to maintain a cleaning schedule’ types of pins in my Pinterest feed lately. And I am trying to get my house under control after (nearly) a year of new baby chaos, and then there was the toy factory explosion that was Christmas.

After a week and a half of trying to get things re-arranged and de-cluttered and cleaned, I have come to the conclusion that maintaining a home is NOT a one-person task. Unless only one person lives there. Getting kids to help clean up can be a rough battle of wills, especially mine – who seem to have inherited stubbornness from both their parents. My husband and I also both come from pack rat backgrounds and we both have dropsy syndrome (where you notoriously drop stuff just any old place) and we’ve passed this on to our kids unfortunately. So, sometimes it looks like little natural disasters have occurred around our home. Big J was sick the week before Christmas and missed school, which threw off my routine a week before I expected. And then enter that toy factory explosion I mentioned. It was a rough winter break for my poor house.

My boys have a fantastic talent for pulling out all the toys, mixing up all the tiny pieces and then leaving them on the floor. We’re talking Olympic athlete talent and skill. Not terribly impressive when you step on that Lego rocket ship or helicopter at 3 am. They are also wonderfully skilled at the art of procrastination and bargaining – they get it completely from their dad. And maybe a little from me. I’ve actually had Big J tell me that he can sit on his pillow with his Lightning McQueen car and just drive on his own legs to avoid cleaning his room. Seriously.

Since we had three whole weeks for winter break (P.S. who had that bright idea? Three weeks was too long!), we tackled the boys’ room last Friday before school started again. It can be a chore in and of itself to get my boys to help clean up, but I hit upon some tricks last week in getting kids to help clean up and I thought I’d share what I learned from my two.  Maybe they can make your cleaning endeavors a bit easier too.

10 Tricks & Tips for Getting Kids to Help Clean Up

Getting Kids to Help Clean Up

1. Give them specific tasks. Exactly how specific depends on age and your child. I could tell Big J (5.5) to pick up all the books and put them in a pile, but Little J (3 next month) needed super specific directions like pick up the yellow car and put it in that blue bucket by the train table. When they knew exactly what was expected, things got accomplished.
2. Work on one area at a time.  I divided the room into four corners and we cleaned one corner at a time and then we took a break. This took longer, but my kids were infinitely more helpful and less whiny. This time, it was more about the principle of cleaning up and caring for thei possessions than getting it done as quickly as possible. Breaking the room into areas worked great because, by the time they were ready to quit, there was usually just a handful of things left and then it was break time.
3. Work on one item at a time. When we first started in the room, there was barely walking space. A large part of this was because, at some point, one of my kids decided they should empty the ENTIRE bookcase. So the first task I set before my kids was to put all the books in a corner. This worked well because it got a large chunk of the mess cleaned up first (before my kids were sick of cleaning) and it freed up space to help get things organized. And it was motivation to me because it looked like we were actually getting somewhere.
4. Take frequent breaks. There are several ways to do this.  I started off by saying “Help me clean up and we’ll take a break in 15 minutes.” It took my boys about 3.5 seconds to realize they were just going to run out the clock with whining, playing and other not-cleaning mischief. So, setting a time limit was not the way to go for us. But, when I divided the room up and said, “Okay, when this corner is clean we can take a break,” we got so much more done. Usually, by the time the whining started up again, we were already mostly done with the corner and I found that using tip #1 was super helpful at this point. In my five-year-old’s eyes, all he could see was stuff that was not allowing him to take a break. So, by breaking it down, we avoided a meltdown. It also helped to have them tell me what they wanted to do during our break. This was two-fold: it distracted them from whining and it gave them something to look forward to and motivation to finish the job.
5. Make break time relaxing and fun. Like I mentioned above, I let my kids plan their break time. Some times they wanted a snack. Or to watch a little TV. Or to play with some of the toys I was not letting them play with during clean-up time. Our breaks varied in length depending on the time of day and what else I needed to accomplish. We took a longer break at lunch time and when I needed a bit of time to put Baby N down for a nap, but we typically took about 15 minutes and that was long enough for my kids to re-charge.
6. Listen to upbeat music while you work. Every time we went back to work, I turned Pandora back on. The 80’s Workout Station was fabulous (I was definitely born at the wrong end of that decade…).  Choose something you like with a good beat, too slow and it’ll put you to sleep. Big J asked me at one point why I kept turning the music on. I asked him if it made it easier to work with some fun music. He thought about it for a second and then said, “Yes, Mom. But cleaning isn’t really fun. I like the music, I don’t like the cleaning.” Smart boy. And it was a good distraction for me too.
7. Don’t let your kids get hungry or tired. Or you. The term ‘hangry’, as in being angry because you’re hungry, is a very real affliction in my household. Make sure to keep the tank full and don’t work (or at least don’t make the kids work) right through nap time. Take a break and give them food and sleep when they need it or move naps to a different room. It takes longer, but everyone will be happier.
8. If you get frustrated, take a break. And then take a break from your kids. It’s okay to turn on a TV show or a movie and let the kids watch while you re-group and re-focus. Or eat lunch. If you need a break from your kids, take it. If you don’t, you’ll get more frustrated and they will get more whiny and be much less helpful. And eat a little chocolate while you’re at it.
9. Make it a game. My boys are competitive. The words ‘on your marks’ will almost always light a fire under them and get them moving. When they would stall and not follow directions, making it a little competition would re-focus them on picking up the Legos rather than playing with them. The only downside to this was when Big J would repeatedly ‘win’, Little J would get frustrated. So then I would make a little race against Mommy and he was suddenly the winner again. Small price to pay for a bucket full of Lego bricks.
10. Reward them. I’m not talking a trip to Disneyland or anything.  Just something simple that will let them know you appreciate their work and help.  Big J got some extra screen time and Little J got a leftover Otter Pop from summer. They aren’t begging to help me clean now, in hopes of rewards, but it got the job done and it has been easier to get Big J to do his normal chores lately. Totally worth not worrying about little Lego and Hotwheel land mines when I checked on them that night. It may also be a good time to start (or re-start) a rewards system for keeping the room clean.

 

Do you have any tips on getting your kids to help clean up?

December 19, 2014 by Krista

Deep Cleaning with Bissell this Holiday Season

This post is sponsored by Bissell.  I was provided with product and compensation for this review; however, I pinky swear and cross my heart that all opinions and content are my own, 100% honest and original.

 

Christmas is quick approaching! Next week, can you believe it?!  If you’re anything like me, you’re running around crazy with last minute preparations and a to-do list longer than your days and your nights are filled with wrapping gifts and deep cleaning.  Anyone else out there?  It can’t just be me!  And, apparently I wasn’t busy enough with three boys, a husband who has traveled more of the past three weeks than not, and all the holiday hullabaloo I seem to get myself into, so we have had at least half a dozen illnesses run a muck through our home in the last two months!  I am so sick of my family being sick!

 

It’s the perfect time of year to get rid of the things you no longer need, use or want in your home, nasty germs and bugs included.  The kids are on winter break now and I am determined to rid our home of things that make us sick.  It has, admittedly, been much longer than it should have been since the last good deep cleaning.  I’ve opted to try and avoid the post holiday clutter and mess by doing a little prep work before!  So, when I was offered the chance to try out the BISSELL ProHeat 2X® Premier 47A23 Upright Deep Cleaner with Scotchgard Protector solution I pretty much jumped at the opportunity… because I wanted to steam those pesky little germs right outta here! And partly because I have three boys, and that equals dirty carpets… but mostly for the germs!  And a little bit for the dirt.

Bissell ProHeat 2x Premier Upright Cleaner

 

With Scotchgard, you can help prevent stains before they even happen.  So, when your mother-in-law calls two days before Christmas and announces they’ll be in town, you can invite her right over with a promise that the carpets are clean enough to eat off of!  Or when tipsy Aunt Lisa spills her red wine on New Year’s Eve, Scotchgard’s 2X Professional Deep Cleaning Formula has got your carpets protected.  I imagine that’s somewhat akin to grape juice and my toddlers, no?  Thank goodness for white grape juice (and wine?)!

 

So, let’s get to the nitty gritty here.  The actual machine.  You now know you should want one… here’s what it can do, just to cement that yearning in your heart a little more.  I decided to tackle my dining room.

Dining room before bissell - left

And since you’re thinking it… why, yes, I do live on a mini golf course.  Seriously.  Green carpet.  Did you hear that?  I know it’s hard to get past the green, but I was actually referring to the second part.  Carpet.  In the dining room.  Helllloo, who puts carpet in a dining room?!  Not someone with three little boys, I’ll tell you that much.  However, I find myself feeding my kids in a carpeted dining room at least a million times a day.  One day, I will replace it with Pergo or a nice fancy hardwood floor, but until that day I have carpet in my dining room.  Which is synonymous for “I have food smashed deep into my dining room floor.”  Time to change that… at least for Christmas.  So I cleared out the table, chairs and other easily movable furniture, vaccuumed for the first time in days (although it looked more like years) and got ready for some deep cleaning.

 

The Bissell ProHeat 2x Upright Cleaner was super easy to use.  I have never before in my life used a steam cleaner and have only seen my mother do it a handful of times.  The ProHeat’s instructions were descriptive, but not confusing and the illustrations were clear and understandable. It was a total breeze to fill the internal bladder compartment with Bissell’s cleaning solution and the water tank was easy to latch, lift and maneuver, carry and ultimately get it placed back onto the machine correctly.  It took me between five and ten minutes to get the machine prepped for cleaning (after I read the instructions, which took at least that long because my kids could sense I was trying to actually be productive and do something.  Ever read with a two-year-old tapping the back of your book?).

Bissell ProHeat 2x Premier Upright Cleaner Tank

 

Running the machine was almost as easy as filling it!  If you can vacuum, you can steam clean with the Bissell ProHeat.  Seriously, it was that easy and familiar.  The trigger handle was easy to use, even with my small hands.  I didn’t feel like I was out of control at all.  The entire machine is relatively light and easy to maneuver.  I daresay it was even fun… kinda like when you get a new washer and dryer.  All of a sudden, I want to steam clean everything.  And the Scotchgard 2x Professional Deep Cleaning Formula smells great, making this even more enjoyable.  I was a little bit worried that the solution would make my house smell like a chemical plant, but it left my home smelling clean and not like a cleaner.  A lot like laundry, without all the folding and ironing.  People still iron, right?

 

About an hour and a half after I started, I stood admiring the cleaner’s patterns in my fresh carpet.  And then I turned around and saw that I had reached the part I was absolutely dreading.  Clean-up.  I was horrified that I’d have to untangle gobs of carpet fuzz and hair from the bristles and that it would be nearly impossible to get it nice and clean.  Guys, guess what?  All I did was run hot water through it to clean it out and then I pulled out a few fuzz balls.  That’s it.  It took me twenty minutes to get everything cleaned out, rinsed out, put away and ready to store.  That’s totally do-able!  I didn’t need any special tools or cleaners and the machine wasn’t leaking water all over the floor afterward.

Bissell ProHeat 2x Premier Upright Cleaner Clean

 

One other thing that totally impressed me with the Bissell ProHeat 2x Steam Cleaner was that it only took my carpets a few hours to dry!  I had the entire room put back together before dinner time.  I often fail to err on the safe side and jump the gun, but definitely within 6 hours or so, the carpet was dry.  I did have the sun shining in from one window, but I was still impressed I didn’t have to pull out the fans and blow the room dry overnight.  I remember hating when my mom cleaned the carpets at home because they would be wet FOREVER and the TV was then out of commission for The.  Whole.  Day.  My boys were pretty disappointed when they didn’t get to eat in the family room because the dining room carpet was already dry… and I almost cried at the thought of all that food they were potentially going to drop all over my clean floors, but they did great.  I’d call that a good day.

 

A successful first time use of a product for me comes when I say, “yeah, I’ll get that back out and use it again.”  And I already have plans for my family room next week… I might discover it’s a good thing I started in the small room, but my family room will have fresh and fluffy carpet for Christmas if I have my way.  I’m excited to try Bissell’s other cleaning formulas and am seriously wondering if the 2X Pet Stain & Odor Formula will get rid of the “boy” smell that seems to be seeping out from under my boys’ bedroom door.  A momma can hope, right?

 

You can save $1.00 on Bissell’s cleaning formulas with the coupon below and it’s good until the end of next July, so clip that baby and tuck it away for whenever your Spring Cleaning Fever hits.  It feels even cleaner when you know it was a dollar cheaper and then you can splurge on that candy bar in the check out line.  See what I did there, I just practically gave you free chocolate… or whatever might be your poison of choice.  So, what are you waiting for?  Clip that coupon!

Bissell ProHeat 2x

 

November 14, 2014 by Krista

Removing Permanent Marker from Textured Walls – An Experiment

Ever have a week where everything just goes so completely not how you planned?  Yeah, that’s been my kind of week.  It’s been busy and a bit hectic.  The time I planned to spend typing up a Thankful Tree post and a giveaway post were actually spent scrubbing permanent marker off my walls.  It’s a good thing my niece is so stinking cute…  I just kept thinking about the end of Toy Story 2 where they put Stinky Pete in the backpack in the luggage sorting area at the airport.  Can you see it too?  He’s picked up from the baggage claim with the bag and an exclamation of “Ooh, Barbie!  A big ugly man doll.”  Then Barbie slides into the pocket next to him with a greeting, “Ooh, you’ll love Amy…. She’s an artist!”  Of course, Amy’s art is all over the side of Barbie’s face.  While Little J did color on Baby N in a decidedly Amy-like fashion with a dry erase marker last week (Seriously.  You can’t make this stuff up.), he was also the one that alerted the two adults in the room about the new “decor”.

Removing Permanent Marker From Textured Walls

So, how do you get permanent marker off a wall?  Well, I have to say I think it depends on the wall.  I found a lot of ideas and tried most of them.  Let me preface this with the detail that we have ridiculously textured walls.  I hate them.  I have two perfectly good Cricuts and vinyl won’t stick to the first walls I am not afraid to adhere it to.  You’ll see why that’s important in a minute.  I hit Pinterest and Google trying to find ideas on how to get this “artwork” off my wall and there was no shortage of ideas.  Here’s how it worked out:

Removing Permanent Marker From Textured Walls_Cleaners

 

1. Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and OxyClean.  I started with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and some oxyclean.  It took the marker on the wall plate off fairly well.  But, when I started scrubbing the textured walls, it pretty much tore the eraser to shreds in mere moments and I was basically left scrubbing with little tiny nubby sponges that just kept disintegrating.  Eventually, I switched to a toothbrush, but there just wasn’t enough pressure on the head of the brush and it just ruined the bristles.  No slipping that one back into the spare toothbrush bag after this, you won’t get away with it, promise.

2. Toothpaste.  Specifically, Colgate Whitening toothpaste.  I’m not sure it did much of anything, to be honest.  Other than cover my wall with minty goop.  Nothing like making a bigger mess for yourself to clean up.  On the plus side, my family room was minty fresh.

3. Hairspray.  This actually worked fairly well.  Marker actually came off the wall with this.  The problem was the texture of the wall.  Even with the toothbrush, I couldn’t get into all the nooks and crannies.  I scrubbed with both the toothbrush and a kitchen sponge.  The sponge was great for getting it off the flatest parts.  The texture of the wall was killer though.  The hairspray was probably one of the best removers, when all was said and done.

4.  Rubbing Alcohol.  I figured since the hairspray worked so well and it’s alcohol-based, maybe rubbing alcohol would work well too.  It wasn’t as amazing as I’d hoped and ended up going back to the hairspray.  It worked about as well as the OxyClean and magic erasers.  And I had to really scrub it.  OR maybe my arm was just getting tired and it just seemed like more work?

4. Bleach Pen.  Because, at this point, it couldn’t get much worse, right?  It did okay, but it’s not where I’d start if my walls suddenly become adorned with permanent toddler art again.  It did the most good on the marks we hadn’t scrubbed yet, taking off the stuff on the surface.  It didn’t stand a chance on the grooves of the texture though.  Next time, I’d just skip this I think.  The pro was that there was little damage to the paint.

5. Acetone Nail Polish Remover.  This was excellent at removing the marker.  I just poured a little on a blue Scotchbrite sponge and went to it.  However, it was also fantastic at removing the paint.  While it worked incredibly well, I wasn’t about to re-texture my wall, so it was very short lived.  I did go back to the wall plate and this quickly removed the faint traces left there.

6. Handsanitizer.  This worked well too.  At least as good as the hairspray.  But I had to use a lot of it.  And if I scrubbed too hard, it too removed some of the paint and texture.  I used the sponge a squeezed out about a nickel-sized circle on it and then just rubbed it over the ink.  It came off fairly easily and removed most of the mark.  If I let it sit for a few minutes, it came off better.

 

So, here’s the before (again):

Removing Permanent Marker From Textured Walls_before

 

 

and the after:

Removing Permanent Marker From Textured Walls_afterYou can still see a few faint areas with marks when the curtains are open and the sun is shining in… otherwise, you’d never notice it unless you were looking for it.  So, moral of the story… hairspray and hand sanitizer are the best contenders for removing permanent markers from textured walls.  At least in my case they were.  I shared this photo on my personal Facebook page and got like 5 people suggesting the magic erasers.  Because of the intense texture, these didn’t work for me.  But I’ve heard they work well on less textured walls.

 

One of my cousins is a teacher and suggested a pink eraser.  I didn’t try it, but it can’t hurt, right…?  What have you used for removing permanent marker from the walls?

 

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • …
  • 25
  • Next Page »

I'm Krista. Ringleader here on While He Was Napping, wife to my handsome Mr. Right & momma to my THREE energetic boys, Big J (9), Little J (6) & Little N (4). We FINALLY added a beautiful little girl to our family last December.

I’m knee-deep in Tonka trucks & Thomas trains. I survive our crazy days with Vanilla Coke, Sonic slushies, sweet snuggles and little giggles. When I tuck them in tight & kiss them good night, I get a little time to create & just be me.


It all happened
while (s)he was napping
Want More of My Story?

Privacy Policy

While He Was Napping respects your privacy and is committed to keeping any personal information collected on this website confidential. To find out what information we collect and how it is used or what options you have regarding your information, see our full privacy policy here. Creative Commons License The website found at whilehewasnapping.com and all subdomainsauthored and published by Krista is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Pretty Chic Theme By: Pretty Darn Cute Design