Jul 1

Jul 1 PINTEREST PROJECT: PART ONE

I know it's Monday, not Tuesday. But this particular Pinterest project has a prolonged waiting time right in the middle, so I'm breaking it up into two posts. In this one, you will see the promises that Pinterest makes, the effort that I put into achieving success, and a sneak peek at the (SAD, VERY SAD) results. Tomorrow, which is Tuesday, there will be a follow-up post with a complete break-down of the (VERY VERY VERY SAD) outcome.

I don't know about you, but I am a shit housekeeper. My husband is

a cheap bastard

on the thrifty side, but even Ted knows that paying the cleaning lady is a necessary expenditure. Mercy the Amazing Nanny does as much cleaning as she can while tending to the

brats

darling angels, but cleaning is not her job. In a (rare and totally unappreciated) effort to save the Tenthoff Family some money, I have offered not once, but twice, to clean the house myself.

These ill-fated bouts of generosity ended poorly, with me being fired by both Ted and Mercy in what can only be described as intervention-like family meetings where they gently explained that the house had become so dirty that they were afraid for the health of our family.

All this being said, we currently do not have a cleaning lady. I seem to have remarkably bad luck when it comes to hiring a person to clean my house. The cleaning lady we had in the city threw a party in our apartment when we were out of town. Despite this, I did not fire her. Then we went away again, and this time she threw a party that necessitated our neighbors calling the cops. After that I did actually fire her.

Since then, we have had two or three different people come to clean our house, but all of them have been terrible at the job. And believe me, my standards are low. I mean, it's hard for me to imagine anyone with lower standards than me when it comes to cleaning ladies. But while I don't mind spending money when there's something to show for it, I do mind spending more than a hundred dollars a week to continue to have a dirty house.

Anyway, all of this is a very long way of explaining why my baking sheets are as disgusting as they are. And they are disgusting:

See? I wasn't exaggerating. Now, in what can only be described as an incredibly ironic gesture, I have a Pinterest board called

Cleaning House

. This is where I collect the myriad cleaning tips and tricks that I never, ever use. Not even during my stints as the Tenthoff Family cleaning lady. But there was one pin that kept catching my eye. If you spend any time at all on Pinterest, you've probably seen it yourself:

By some miracle, I happened to have the two necessary ingredients, baking soda and hydrogen peroxide, in the house. (That is actually a total lie - I had to make Ted go to the store and buy baking soda.) Who the fuck has baking soda on hand??? A functioning household-runner, that's who. Not me. Until now:

I followed the directions carefully. I mixed up a paste, and applied it to the entire surface of the pans. In fact, since it was a little unclear how thick the paste was, I mixed up two batches of different consistencies to see which one would be more effective. (This is another enormous lie. The difference in the batches was totally accidental, and I was too lazy to fix it.)

Here is the experiment in progress:

Here's a close-up of the pastier paste:

Here's the less-pastey paste:

Now, you have to leave the stuff on the trays to work for like eight hours. So tune back in tomorrow to see whether I was able to see my face in the newly shiny baking trays. But here's a hint: NO I WASN'T. See the picture below for a sneak preview of the disappointment that lies ahead: