Glurch vs. Vinegar

The other day my daughter brought home "glurch" from preschool.  You might know it as oobleck or slime or flubber or gloop or goop and countless other names, no doubt. If you didn't already know what I'm talking about, you can probably get a pretty good visual from those various names!  Specifically, this glurch was a mixture of glue, borax and food coloring.  The kids love it but as you can imagine, I've always been a leery.  It just seems like that glurch could do some damage.

So when my daughter brought home her glurch, I was a little paranoid and kept close tabs on it.  But I did let her play with it a little bit, at the table.  Unfortunately, when I went away for the weekend, I never thought to mention to my husband that there was a dangerous item within her reach...a rookie mistake...and a mistake I would pay for.

Within minutes of returning home yesterday evening, the kids informed me that the glurch had made a bit of a mess.  As it turns out, there was a large stain in the family room and an even nastier stain in my daughter's bedroom.  To give you perspective, here's a picture of part of the mess in my daughter's room.  It might look wet in the photo but that's dried glue, folks - crusty and solid...and blue.

I was not happy. 

After a quick Internet search, I discovered that supposedly vinegar would dissolve the glurch.  The stain on Annika's floor was pretty bad.  Could the vinegar actually get that stuff out?!

I hauled my supplies up to Annika's room: vinegar, a paper towel, my stiff brush and the steam cleaner. I poured the vinegar onto the paper towel and let it sit for a bit.  I'm not sure how many days the glurch had been there but I'm guessing it was a few.

 

The vinegar helped a little but there was still a lot of crusty glurch - particularly around the edges.  So I just went for it and poured the vinegar out of the bottle onto the stain and this time I let it sit for even longer.

Unfortunately I think the borax bleached the carpet.  Or maybe the borax and the bleach sitting together for a while bleached the carpet.  I can't tell if the pink was already there in the previous pictures.  I don't see any pink but there was a lot more glurch on the ground too.  Who knows?  But one this *is* for sure and that's that the glurch is definitely dissolving.

I poured more vinegar onto the remaining glurch areas. Several times I poured water from that cup, as well.  I also used my stiff wire brush.

On a side note, it is *quite* satifsying to see the water getting sucked out of your carpet by your steam cleaner.  A little bonus tip here: if you're going to be crazy enough to have lots of children and white carpets, then a steam cleaner is a must.  Although in my defense, when we settled upon the color of these carpets, we had no children.  Now I would totally know to get some sort of multi-colored, speckled carpet! *hehe*

I vastly prefer this stain to the original one.  I'm still bummed that her carpet got stained at all but these things happen when you have kids.  I think maybe if I could have gotten to the stain right away, the carpet wouldn't have gotten bleached.

In the end, I declare vinegar the winner, wouldn't you agree? Oh, and if you were wondering about the stain in the family room - it's completely gone.  I never thought to take before pictures but there's no trace of it now.  Yippee!