everything's covered in goo

when we looked at this house and were thinking about buying it, i looked in the closets, saw the white vinyl coated wire shelving systems that i like, and uttered an inner 'yay.'

then we moved in, and i touched them, discovering a weird sticky coating. at first, i found it on the bathroom shelves, thinking it was just drip-down from whatever bottles had been set there before. as i ventured on, however, i realized that this unidentifiable grime was on every surface of every wire rack in the house. it wasn't on any other surface, just the wire shelves. topside, underside, sideside, you name it, it was like they'd been dipped in goo.

i also noticed that on many of the shelves, the goo had attracted a significant amount of dirt... so now, they were sticky and dirty. great.

the hardest part however, was cleaning them. i tried soap and water; nothing. windex; nothing. alcohol; nothing. no standard cleaning methods worked. i finally came across the wonder that is the 'magic eraser,' which doesn't clean EVERYTHING but comes pretty darn close. these did work, very well actually, but they rip and tear so easily, progress was painfully slow. to really get the scum off, you had to carefully wipe down each individual wire making up the shelves, yet, it was the only way that worked, so i toiled on.

today, cleaning the house and doing some rearranging now that we've got a better feel for the house, i was attacking a set of shelves i'd put off because a) you can only clean so many wire shelves before you go insane (no more wire shelves!) and b) because up till now we haven't used this closet. i started with the magic erasers, which got ripped pretty fast, and realized i hadn't tried nail polish remover yet. i love nail polish remover, it's useful for so much more than its namesake, and in this case, it worked very well. i only wish i'd thought of it months ago.

i don't know what's scarier, that somehow these shelves got covered in mysterious stickiness that makes you seriously wonder about the previous owner, or that it was so freaking hard to get it cleaned up, but at least now i've got it figured out.