Magic

About a week in to taking up life aboard once again, Scott and I are getting nicely settled and readjusted. Yesterday I tackled two projects that had been mildly irritating me for a while now: the cabin overhead and some (unrelated) melted wax.

Between using the diesel/kerosene stove and lighting candles aboard, the fiberglass overhead continually gradates from a shiny beige-ish off-white to a dull grey. Cleaning it again is no easy task. Soot isn't like regular dirt. It is greasy, grimy, and embeds deeply into any tiny nook and divet the fiberglass might have. Plus, the overhead is, not surprisingly, physically over your head. Cleaning it means looking directly upward, with your arms above your head, and gravity assisting the dirty water in trickling back down your arm and into your shirt sleeves. The best way to clean our fiberglass overhead is with a super-scrubby sponge (the yellow sponges with the very coarse green scrubby side, not the blue ones with the no-scratch scrubby side), plenty of Dawn soap, a washcloth, and a sink close by to continually rinse with. Scrub (hard) with the sponge, then immediately rinse with the washcloth. It sounds simple enough, and it is, it just takes a really long time. Cleaning the overhead is also a high-satisfaction project, if it manages to get completely finished, which it did. This morning I got to wake up, stick my head out of the v-berth, and see a shiny, clean ceiling. Lovely.

The other project that had been awaiting some attention was a rather significant amount of wax that found itself melted into our navy-blue cushions during the February trip to the Olympics. I'd scraped at it before, but had found little luck. Yesterday I thought maybe going after it with a needle might allow me to pick the wax out. Nope. White wax remained embedded in blue cushion. A quick Internet search led me to the solution. When I first read that the wax could be melted into a paper bag, I envisioned only a bigger mess, more deeply embedded than the original mess. But it seemed the Internet had formed a consensus that this was the way to go, even on fabrics much more delicate than boat-seat cushions.

So I found a paper bag and dug out the iron. I set the iron to a low-medium setting, and I began ironing on the bag over the spilled wax. Immediately, every spot of wax (of which there were many) began to seep through the bag. I moved the bag to some fresh paper, and repeated, and repeated, and repeated. It worked like true magic. Places had been waxy and white were returned to their original blue. The cushion even became soft again. I couldn't believe it. A while after it cooled, the places that the bulk of the wax landed had turned a little lighter again, but, if I hadn't known the original problem existed, I probably never would have noticed it. Magic, I tell you. Magic.

I call that a successful Sunday on a boat!

Cheers,
Mandy