Mr. Clean Challenge

Recently, I was sent a box.  When I opened the box, it wasn’t actually clear to me what I was supposed to do.  Then I read the paper instructions in the box.  It’s amazing what reading instructions will do – they tell you what to do!  So, I followed the instructions.  It’s kind of a cleaning challege between Mr. Clean magic erasers (now with Febreze!) and the “Leading Brand” spray cleaner.  Note to Mr. Clean PR people: you might want to buy thicker “Leading Brand” stickers because I could kind of read under it and see that it was Clorox.  So, for your viewing pleasure, I offer you my photo montage of my Mr. Clean Challenge.

Here’s the box before I opened it:

And what was inside:

I’ll explain what the spoon and the crayons are for in a bit.  As you can see, I got a box of the Magic Erasers, a wooden spoon (with a recipe for chili attached), a bottle of the Leading Brand of cleaner, a box of 8 Crayola crayons, an orange Crayola marker, and 2 tiles with “soap scum” on them.

At first, I didn’t realize the tiles had soap scum on them, but they are pretty grungy.

I used the Magic Eraser first, after wetting and wringing it out, and I have to say the “soap scum” came off pretty easily and without much scrubbing effort.

Then I sprayed on the “Leading Brand” and scrubbed with a paper towel.  I scrubbed pretty hard.  Like, really hard.  It didn’t really help.

Then I took the Magic Eraser and cleaned the other half of the tile so I had a clean start.  I drew on the clean tile with the marker (top) and three crayon colors.

As before, the left side was cleaned with the Magic Eraser and the right side was cleaned with the “Leading Brand”.  To be fair, the Leading Brand didn’t really do anything but wet the tile.  The marker just wiped off and the crayon was rubbed mostly off by just the paper towel.

I told you I would explain the wooden spoon: it’s to make chili.  Since I wasn’t supposed to clean the wooden spoon with the Magic Eraser or anything, I didn’t make the chili.  But I did wash and keep it.  In the end, you can see that the Magic Eraser is pretty, well, magic.  It makes cleaning scummy things easier.  I think if you have a situation that would only get cleaned with a lot of scrubbing and elbow grease, using a Magic Eraser will make the job a dream.  For simple surface cleaning, though, a Magic Eraser might be overkill.  As for the Febreze part of the eraser, I’m not really sure it made a difference.  It didn’t make cleaning smell like fun, but on the other hand, it didn’t make things smell over-flowery, either.

Bottom line: Magic Erasers are like a magic cleaning tool, but really only need to be used in heavy scrubbing situations.  You might also want to do a test patch on painted walls to make sure you’re not scrubbing the paint itself off.