Saturday, December 25, 2010

Acrylic paint remover

Our tenant damaged our rental property and left a lot of garbage in the house and acrylic paint in the restroom and laundry area. It left a very ill feeling in my stomach to ever rent again. And don’t ever be nice to them if you ever decided to sue them for anything. They turn around and do you a big favor.

As we decided to sell the rental property and move on with our lives, we have to fix it up to working conditions and clean it up. One of the hardest things is to remove acrylic pain from tiles. It’s hot pink in color. They sure do not look good on bathroom tiles and on washer and dryer.

I did some research online on how to remove pain from anything. I had no idea what kind of paint they were but figure they are acrylic for T-shirt printing paints. And suggestions were made to use the following mixture to remove acrylic paints.

2 part ammonia
2 part white vinegar
1 part salt

Mix the ingredients well and then spray on the paint and leave it overnight. Since the property is 2 hours away, I did not want to wait overnight or stay over at a hotel for this. I let the mixture stay on the paint for about an hour or so and then I start scouring. At first it was the smaller spots that came off easily. After scouring with hot water on a heavy duty scotch brite scouring pad with my thumb and finger, I tried the paint scrapper and it worked really well. The paint came off easily.

I am very please with the result. It took me about 2 hours and $3 to clean this mess. The property looks much better and it’s ready for the market. I am not sure if the market is ready for this.








Monday, December 13, 2010

Christmas tree and the meaning of holidays?

We bought a small table top Christmas tree just to have it for our first child last year. As of today, we still haven't gotten a chance to get it out of the box and put it up. I question the purpose of it. Do I have to be a Christian to celebrate Christmas? I am not even a Christain.

What is the meaning of holidays? I realized my husband has been doing a lot of get together around the holidays. They do a lot more than my family. It's actually nice to do some catch up at the end of the year to see how everyone is doing. Our family only get together on special occasions like wedding, big birthday party, funeral. Holidays aren't a big thing for them. And they don't ususally all get together with extend families.

It is nice to have get togethers with extended families once in a while. I guess in my parent's side of the family, they are too focus on making a living. They don't want to give the extra time they have off during the holidays to extended families. They rather rest and spend it with them immediate families. There is nothing wrong with that. It's just makes the extended families a little more distance.