snow day scrubbing

Today is a snow/ice day for me, so a rare Monday morning post about a little project from this morning is in order!! As much as I dream about big projects that I want to do on the house, like finishing the basement and renovating the entire kitchen,  little projects that focus on one tiny element and are actually do-able right now are much more satisfying.

Last night I saw an article about how to clean marble, specifically a small area of marble under a door. We just so happen to have a piece of marble under our bathroom door that separates the bathroom tile from the hard wood in the hall. I had noticed how dingy and not-at-all pretty it was, but had put little to no thought into doing anything about it. Our marble is nowhere near as pretty as the type pictured in the article, but when I saw the article, all of a sudden a light bulb went off. Maybe our marble is just dirty! I pinned the article knowing I wanted to try it out one day and see.


Fast forward to 5:30 this morning, when a text came in from our school closing system telling me that my district was closed. Yayyyyy! I went back to sleep for 2 hours, sat in front of the news for an hour with coffee, and then I knew just what I wanted to do: clean the marble piece in the bathroom! And so I did.

I followed the method in the article very roughly. First I razored off a few paint spatters that were on it from painting the hall. Next I scrubbed it with a mixture of Bon Ami cleanser and hydrogen peroxide, using a scrubby sponge. After that, I used sand paper and a ton of elbow grease to sand the entire thing, using hydrogen peroxide to get it wet while I sanded. I also cut out the old caulk around the edge and put in a new strip on each side.
The only bummer of the whole project is I didn't get a great "before" picture to show just how dingy it was when I started. The picture above is "in process", and it's covered in cleanser.

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Here's a close up of how it looked after I had scrubbed it with the cleanser, hydrogen peroxide, and scrubby sponge. A lot better already, but still really grey and dingy. See the spot labeled "original color"? For some reason, that small spot was the original bright white, and that gave me a goal to keep scrubbing for!

 

I was using my phone to take pictures, so the difference is much more subtle in picture than it was in person, but you can see the gradual change that happened as I started sanding it. 

During the entire process, it went from beige (before any work), to grey (after scrubbing with cleanser), to white (after sanding)!

 

I keep walking into the hallway just to look at my "new" white door step. Next up? Painting the trim and bathroom door bright white.