What happens when your toddler mistakes your wall for a canvas? You have very unique works of art all over the house. Not only unique, these artworks are abstract and priceless, too. But no matter how unique they may be, you don’t want them hanging from the walls of your house!
On one morning of June 2015, my daughter took my kitchen and living room walls for canvases. When I caught her, she was already done drawing on three walls and wrapping up her artwork on the fourth. She drew with a pen in one hand and a pencil in another for greater speed and coverage. An ambidextrous person in the making? Perhaps.
Her drawings, which resembled the humps and waves you see on an ECG (electrocardiograph) report, made me act like a mad woman. I was so angry that I cried. Being someone who is fastidious about cleanliness, this incident was similar to someone pouring buckets of black tar on white walls. I knew I had to find a way to remove these medical reports from the walls, my mental peace is important to me.
I started with liquid laundry detergent and a scrub. Laundry detergent could remove the pencil marks but not the lines created with the stubborn ink of a ballpoint pen. I resorted to my old pal, Google. She (I like to think Google is a woman) came up with a list of tricks. I tried one after another. Most of them failed. I learned that body spray, nail polish remover, toothpaste, and shaving foam are not particularly effective at removing ink stains from a wall. But there was one thing that worked like magic -- hand sanitizer! All you need is some hand sanitizer and a towel. You pour liquid hand sanitizer on a towel and just rub the stain in a circular motion. The stain should come off instantly!
I had one small bottle of hand sanitizer at home and I finished the entire bottle on my first mission to erase a little girl's artwork from my walls. But later that week, I bought a few more bottles lest my daughter embarked on new wall art projects.
The ECG reports are now gone and my walls are clean again, but not as clean as they used to be. Some faded ink stains are still there in a few places that only my eyes can see! But that’s okay -- I can live with them as long as my guests can't see them. And this write-up will be incomplete if I don't extend my deepest gratitude to the person or people, who invented multi-purpose hand sanitizer for the mankind.
**Photo taken from Google Images
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