Monday, September 12, 2011

Things My Toddler Teaches Me: Pumpkin Wax and Wood Floors

To know me is to know my life never slows down, my house never goes completely quiet, and my boys NEVER stop teaching me how to raise them. 

The latest lesson begins with a pumpkin spice candle and my wood floors.  In the spirit of fall and the fast approaching festivities of the holidays I grabbed some yummy smelling candles for the house.  My favorite being pumpkin spice, there were two large glass jar candles and three mini ones.  They were burning for a good half hour to an hour so the top layer of wax had liquefied. 

I soon discovered just how tall our three-year-old had gotten.  The candles were sitting on the kitchen bar which is over 4 feet tall.  His lanky arm reached up and grabbed one of the mini glass jars then dropped it onto the wood floor in the living room when he realized it was HOT. 

In true Bam fashion he bolted from the scene of the crime screaming "Sorry!"  Hubs tried to wipe it up, but as most of us know hot wax and paper towels are not a good combination.  It splattered all over the walls too. 

Let it cool.  I let it sit overnight, driving Hubs' OCD into overdrive.  After I dropped Bam off at daycare,  where he could do the least damage, I swung by my favorite coffee shop for a Pumpkin Spice Latte.  Sipping on the yummy goodness, I grabbed a spoon, a broom, and the dust pan. 

Thirty minutes of scraping and sweeping got the majority of the wax off of the wood floor, but there was still a waxy film.  What to do, what to use?  Magic Eraser. 

Now there's the problem of scraping the wax off of the semi-gloss painted walls.  The spoon was too harsh, leaving silver scrape marks, the magic eraser wasn't able to penetrate the wax nor get rid of the spoon marks.  My only alternative (or just an excuse), PAINT.

Guess what color I picked?  NOT PUMPKIN ORANGE! 

2 comments:

Laura said...

Pumpkin orange toned down!

Jenny Georgio-who said...

The secret to getting wax out of anything....

Get a kitchen towel or something thick and a hot iron. Press the iron into the towel for a few seconds and the heat warms the wax and makes it stick to the kitchen towel.

Hope this helps for future reference.