As you know I have been working on restoring a wooden baby cradle that my father made for me when I was a baby. I'm doing great on the project and have made a ton of progress. In fact, I am fairly close to being done. Today I went over the entire cradle with a fresh coat of polyurethane and when it dries it will only need one more coat to finish it up and the knobs screwed on.
As I painted on the polyurethane I managed to get some on my arm. Yes I was wearing gloves but I managed to get up above the glove when I reached under the body of the cradle to reach the rocker underneath. I probably should have been wearing long sleeves to do this project but it was around 104 degrees out today so I wasn't really seeing that as a viable option so I decided to just go for it.
This isn't my first time using the stuff. For the past few weeks I have been working on painting the knobs to the cradle and last time got it all over my fingers (that time I hadn't worn gloves - lesson learned.) It made my fingers perpetually sticky and nothing I tried seemed to get it off. I even tried Comet bleach. I eventually got it off using the Comet, massive amounts of hand scrub/exfoliator, and basically scrubbing my skin off. The next day I went to Lowe's to find out how to properly remove it for the next time I managed to get it all over myself. Their solution was to use paint thinner or mineral spirits (basically very similar to paint thinner.) Yeah... I am so not pouring paint thinner on my hands.
After not being to thrilled with what Lowe's had to say I went to Google and asked the web for alternative suggestions. After an hour or so of reading/researching I found a few posts from moms saying that they had used vegetable oil which is then easily washed off with regular soap to remove the sticky polyurethane substance.
When I got the sticky paint all over my arm today I was less than pleased with myself and was not looking forward to repeating the skin scrubbing experience. Then I remembered what I had read about the vegetable oil and figured I would try it. I didn't have much to lose and if it worked it would be much better than the alternative so I figured why not?
I grabbed the vegetable oil out of the cabinet. I keep it on hand because I use it for baking and for making waffles on lazy Saturday mornings. I poured some into my hand and rubbed it all over my arm where the polyurethane had already dried into a sticky patch. After rubbing the oil all over the area I proceeded to wash it all off with regular hand soap at the kitchen sink.
Sure enough not only did the oil wash right off but all traces of the sticky polyurethane were gone. To boot my skin was left soft feeling instead of raw and red from scrubbing and the entire process took less than five minutes. I was thrilled. Who knew you could use ordinary vegetable oil to painlessly get sticky paint off your skin??? AWESOME!! Thank you Google moms!!
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