cheap and effective... I like it!

  So you know when something works so well that you just have to tell somebody about it?  Well I have this chair...

older picture of dirty chair

I bought it off of Craigslist for $150.  It's a Pottery Barn Comfort Square with down cushions and the price tag that was left on the leg said $899.00.  I felt like I had gotten a really good deal EXCEPT that the previous owner had let her large Husky dog hang out on it, and the arms were discolored compared to the rest of the chair.  It's a very comfortable chair and I love it, but I have no intention of paying the $449 to replace the current slipcover for a new one.

So the other day I doused the dark spots with Shout and stuck the slipcover in the wash with some bleach, and then I added some more bleach, just in case.  When I took the slipcover out of the wash to hang dry it.... it was YELLOW!!!

I was beside myself worried that we were getting ready for my son's 4th birthday party and I would be stuck with a yucky, yellow chair.  So I went into the garage to look for something to fix the problem and I discovered this...

A super duper cheap laundry detergent that I had picked up a while ago because it was 2/$5.00 and I felt like being cheap.  I read the instructions and it said I could use the liquid detergent straight from the bottle onto the fabric, so that's what I did. Praying the whole time that I wasn't ruining a perfectly good slipcovered chair.

And when I pulled the slipcover out of the washer it was clean... I mean CLEAN.  No yellow in sight and it had removed a lot of the discoloration that had been there before.  CLEAN.

So there ya have it... a cheap and effective product that can remove stains AND yellowing from using too much bleach.  I'm sold.

~  Kim :)

** I would have taken a picture of the clean chair but after 5 days, it's lookin' kinda grungy again.
White slipcover + (2) children = grungy furniture... time to break out the Sun plus Oxi!!!