IF you’re despairing over splattered paint on your carpet, pen ‘art’ across your walls or dried-on PVA glue running down your kitchen table legs, fear not.
Fabulous consulted a school and nursery cleaner for their professional tips to remove all those common child-related stains – and you might be surprised by how easily some of them come off once you have the right technique.
Ricardo Ferreira, operations manager at Regional Cleaning Services, is responsible for training the cleaning team who work in many schools and nurseries all over London.
With almost 15 years’ experience under his belt, tackling a glitter explosion or extricating trampled-in Play-Doh is child’s play.
Here are the expert’s top cleaning tricks for those all-too-common mishaps and spillages…
Playdough
It might surprise parents now to know that playdough actually started out as a cleaning product.
The modelling compound was launched in the 1930s as wallpaper cleaner before becoming the children’s arts and crafts staple we know it as today.
That may come as a relief for parents whose kids have smeared it across the living room walls, but it turns out it’s also fairly simple to get out of carpets, too.
Ricardo says: “We find placing a damp warm cloth over the Play-Doh will soften it and then a stiff brush can wipe it off relatively easily.”
Felt tip pen
Pen in-hand, you may notice your child is seized by a Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen-type urge to give your interiors a questionable makeover.
But before you give your local painter/decorator a call, there’s a simple trick you can try.
Ricardo says: “With felt tip stains, a mixture of white vinegar and water tends to work well.”
Glue and glitter
Your kids might not be able to tell you what your old tape player could possibly be used for, but painting your palms in PVA glue proves to be enduringly popular throughout the generations.
Fortunately, the subsequent glue peelings can be easily picked up with a vacuum cleaner, but sometimes your little one’s enthusiasm can unintentionally result in great dollops of glue setting in the most unexpected places – and the same goes for glitter.
But there’s no need to fret.
Ricardo says: “With glue, rubbing alcohol tends to work best, and for glitter, the best solution would be to hoover up the main parts and then dab a damp tissue over the remaining bits so they stick to the tissue.”
Paint
So you’ve laid out the protective sheets and covered the kids from the neck down in painting aprons and yet, somehow, it still manages to get everywhere.
When it comes to removing unwanted paint splatters, Ricardo advises: “Most of the time, you can rub vegetable oil on it and then scrape it off with a knife or plastic scraper.
“If it’s on the carpet, getting a wet cloth and dabbing over the mark can often remove it, adding some warm water can also help break it up if the paint is dry.
“This also works great for wine stains on a carpet too – although we don’t come across too many of those in schools and nurseries, thankfully!”
Stickers
Some children find there simply isn’t enough space in sticker books.
If you’re always finding yourself scrubbing unwanted toddler tags off walls, furniture and doors, a simple tweak could transform your results.
Ricardo says: “The best way we found was to scrub them with vegetable oil, it will remove the sticker and the sticker marks left behind.”
Problem solved.
For cleaning, hacks see how cleaning fan shares how to reach even the tightest spaces using a simple kitchen utensil.
Also, watch Britain’s cleanest man, spend nine hours mopping his kitchen and uses a steamer to get rid of dust every day.
If interested in household hacks, check out this video on how to clean a rug with a saucepan lid.
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