Update on Granite Countertops and How To Get a Stain Out!

I hope you all had an awesome weekend!!  We were loving the cooler temperatures.  My awesome hubby got up and ran a race Saturday- WHICH HE WON!!!  I was so sad I hadn't drug my kids out to watch him.  He said the coolest part was having the police escort.  The coolest part for me was him winning a complete car detail!  So proud of him!!

I had a different post planned for today, but I'm experiencing some technical difficulties in getting all the pictures I need uploaded so it will have to wait until Wednesday.  Instead, I will be talking about my granite countertops.

To be perfectly honest, I'm having a love-hate relationship with this surface!  I love the color and how it goes with my paint color choices but I am hating how I NEVER seem to be able to get it clean.  It is a really hard surface to see if it is clean unless you are standing in a certain light and I always seem to stand in that light AFTER I put my cleaning stuff away!  Grrrrrr!!!!!  A friend did lead me onto a great cleaning product which has seemed to help so the countertops and I are getting a long better.

I month or so ago I was really having a hard time with them when they got their first stain.  Granite is porous so it will still stain even after being sealed if you are not careful.  I had gotten a bunch of peaches and set a box on the counter while I made time in my schedule to blanch and prep them for a yummy pie!  It took me a few days and unbeknownst to me, a peach started rotting in the bottom, leaked through the cardboard box, and onto my countertops.  By the time I discovered it and extracted the box from the counter the damage was done.  Major frowny face!

It left this awesome stain:

See that rectangular orangish stain?  It made me sad!

I did a little research to see if anything would take it out.  Luckily I found the solution pretty quickly and it was an easy fix.  Turns out, all you need is a little bleach!   Bleach will take stains out of granite without effecting the color of the stone itself.  AWESOME!!

I took a gallon freezer bag, cut it on two sides, laid it flat over the stain, secured the edges with painters tape and then took my turkey baster and squirted some bleach underneath the bag and spread it around.  You can leave it on there for 24 hours!  I did it for a few hours and it lifted the stain quite a bit!

In full disclosure - this guy handled the bleach!  He's super protective of me doing anything in my prego state.  

In the picture above you can see the wet mark it left when we took the bleach off.  That went away in  a few hours.  Sadly, I also discovered all the stain was not lifted.  I still have to repeat the process but the initial one got most of the stain out.

There you have it folks.  Don't be afraid of stains (most of them) with your granite.  Good ole bleach will save the day!