I know, you are thinking, "big deal Heather, lots of bathtubs are white!" Yes, I am aware of that. But my bathtub, which is supposed to be white, has always been stained with what I determined must be hard water stains. It was like that when we moved in and over the last 10 years I have tried everything I could think of to try and get it clean. Occasionally I would get the stains to fade a bit but it was far from being clean and white. I had resigned myself to it being and old dirty tub and consoled myself with that fact that I had at least killed the germs in it with bleach!
In addition to sprays, scrubs and chemicals have also tried the tips of other people that I've found on Pinterest and yesterday I came across yet another pin about tub cleaner. This one said to mix vinegar and blue Dawn. Today I decided to give it a whirl while I was cleaning the bathroom. I did not have any blue Dawn and I already had a spray bottle of vinegar and green Dawn in the laundry room which is my "magic" stain remover. (I pride myself on being able to remove almost anything!) I decided to heat up 1/2 a cup of vinegar like Jennifer instructs and just add it to my "magic" stain remover spray rather than getting blue Dawn and mixing up a whole new bottle. I shook it up, sprayed it on the entire tub and went about cleaning the rest of the bathroom. About 10 minutes later I turned around to check the tub expecting to see the same persistent stains but what I saw almost made me pee my pants! The stains were going away! It occurred to me then to take a before picture which I hadn't done because I had little faith it would work. After I took the before picture I sprayed more stuff on for good measure and continued to let it work.
Here is the before and after. As I mentioned the before was taken after the solution had already began to work so the tub actually looked worse than this. And the after looks better than this once it's dry.
There are still a couple of spots I'd like to soak longer. Jennifer said wait 1-2 hours and I don't know if I let it sit for quite 2 hours. It even FEELS clean. Owen was super excited to take his bath in the super clean tub tonight! And I really can't express how thrilled I am that the tub is white. I keep going in there to admire it! It has been the bane of my cleaning existence for 10 years and all it took was vinegar and dish soap!
