Monday 1 July 2013

Little things that change your life #1: How to remove scuff marks from white Ikea furniture

Hello! So after being reprimanded for not blogging for almost a YEAR (whoops), I am returning with a series of posts about the little things that make life better. There is no limit to the possibilities for blogging about this subject really, but I am going to start with household things (as since I wrote the last post, we bought a house! yay!)

The subject of this particular post is one of my very pleasing recent discoveries. I bought this desk from ebay. It was owned by a nice lady who runs a wedding shop (hence all the dresses. She was not mad miss havisham type as I feared from photo!):



I was really after the two vertical drawer units, not the piece of glass 'desktop' that came with it. The drawer units (Ikea 'Alex') are £55 each but I got the whole desk pictured for £30. Brilliant! The only downside was that there were quite a few scuffs on it where the wedding shop lady's boots had rubbed on it as she was doing her wedding-shoppy-accounts. Look:


Dirty.

I tried to get them off using a wet cloth and also a pencil eraser, but no dice. Or rather, no scuff-free Alexes. Then I remembered seeing this thing called Magic Eraser in Homebase. I trotted off to our local hardware store and had a look in the cleaning section (sorry Homebase, you are too far away now). All the Magic Eraser packets looked like they had been there since 1990. I was dubious but it was only about £2 so thought I'd give it a go. A Magic Eraser, if you are like me and coming late to the scuff-removing party, is like a sort of white sponge that you run under warm water and then rub over the scuffs. The scuffs are then MAGICALLY ERASED!!! It is like actual magic. Didn't even need to scrub! Look:


Magic!


Isn't that brilliant. I was so excited to try it I may have not been patient enough to go to the tap at first and licked the corner of the magic eraser. It still worked, but I have been slightly worried about my tongue ever since. And also slightly tempted (having seen no tonguey ill-effects) to try it on my teeth...

To complete the desk story, I went to Ikea and in superhuman strength display managed to wrestle a 2m piece of new desk top into the car. It is white, less deep and more wide than the glass. Also less wedding-shoppy so Husband approves. It is long enough that we can sit side-by-side and work...no more fighting over who gets the desk. We both love work so much that that used to happen... Will show u a photo of the new desk when I have one. in the meantime, here is a photo of a rhino in a field from this weekend. Longleat is surreal and brilliant!



Oh, if you live in Bath and would like the desktop, let me know - it is incredibly heavy but very pretty if you like that sort of thing, and is waiting for you in my garage!

Next time: Amazing kitchen gadgets. Ohyes, the adrenaline is high in Bath! See you then!!

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