Everything you ever wanted to know about my cleaning habits and more

Thanks to Oxiclean for sponsoring this post and keeping my kids in clean shirts.

 So how do I keep those shirts looking this good at the end of the year?

Let me tell you a story about the day I found out my son’s school was introducing a uniform. Oh, it was quite the day. I laughed, I cried, I wondered how in the world am I going to keep a four-year-old boy’s white shirt white?

I wasn’t going to, was the answer. I didn’t even come close. The uniform calls for either white or navy tops and after all the white shirts came out of the dryer with faded stains and a general dinginess, I wound up replacing most of them with navy blue ones. It was just a safer bet.

Then my daughter started school and a friend passed down some uniform clothes her girls had outgrown. There were sharp navy jumpers, nice cardigans, and BRIGHT, WHITE shirts.

“How on earth did you keep the white shirts so crisp and white?” I asked.

“OxiClean,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

And then I went out and bought some.

It’s kind of like magic. I just toss a scoop or two into the barrel of the front-loading washing machine before adding a load of white, then add detergent and launder the clothes as usual. Okay, fine, I usually forget to add the scoop first and then wind up crouched down on the floor with half a load of dirty clothes on my lap while I scoop the OxiClean Versatile Stain Remover Powder under the remaining clothes and that method ALSO WORKS.

I have begun buying white shirts to add a little variety to my children’s navy on navy wardrobe and, thanks to the wonder of OxiClean, I even have some to hand down to my baby who is starting kindergarten next year. (How did that happen?!) White shirts, worn by actual children, are good enough to hand down. Can you even believe it?

But that is not all. No, that is not all.

I am extremely pleased to report that you can all begin inviting me over for dinner again and you don’t need to hide away your white table cloths and red wine. Yes, I am just as clumsy as ever and there is a better than even chance that I will spill wine all over your nice things, but spot treat those stains with an OxiClean solution and you are back in the white table cloth game, my friends.

That kind of spot treatment (applying the solution, waiting a few minutes, and then rinsing) has also been known to lift all manner of mystery stains off upholstered chairs in my house. In fact, the OxiClean website has so many more different uses for the product; it will blow your mind.

But I have one more clutch use for OxiClean that you have to hear about. It’s my kitchen sink. I have a great big, vintage, porcelain-enameled cast-iron sink that I LOVE … when it’s clean. But coffee and tomato sauce and various other scuff marks can make it look pretty gross after a while. I used to have to pour bleach into a spray bottle and then line the sink with paper towel and then squirt the paper towels with bleach so they’d stay up on the sides of the sink and then leave that overnight. It was a PROCESS and not one that I was likely to do as often as I should.

But now all I have to do is mix a thin paste out of OxiClean and water (which I can do directly in my kitchen sink) and spread it all over the sink. I leave it for a while before rinsing and, presto chango, I have a sparkling white sink again.

I am a little astonished that I found this much to say about OxiClean because I don’t actually think about it all day, everyday. It’s just a solid household cleaning product that I always make sure I have on hand, is all. (But, parents of small children, do keep this stuff out of reach and follow the label’s handling precautions. We don’t want anyone getting hurt.) You can find it at Walmart and Shoppers Drug Mart across Canada, and find out more tips on stain-fighting on the Facebook page.

This post was sponsored by Oxiclean. Hurray for them!