steam machine

This post is sponsored by HomeRight, however all opinions are 100% mine. Affiliate links may be contained in this post.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat at the kitchen table or been driving the car having a conversation with one of the part-time children about their day and all of a sudden they say, “So I told him you would do it.”

Stop.

Hold the phone.

Shut the front door.

You did what? What did you just volunteer me for child?

To buy ad space on a t-shirt.

To help sell peaches.

To makeover the locker room.

While there are countless more events to note in this department, today I would like to talk about the time I was volunteered to makeover a football locker room.

What had happened was…

Bill, the 17 year old, is very interested in what I do for a living – blogging. He has figured out the basics of it and knows that I have pretty decent painting skills.

He knows enough to be dangerous.

Not to himself though – to me.

He loves to try and explain to people what I do.

And then he loves to volunteer me.

Now, in all honesty, I really don’t care. I love helping the kid out. This locker room makeover though – I don’t think we’ve ever wanted to rip out each other’s throats more.

So he finds out his football coach wants to makeover the locker room. Bill promptly tells his coach that I would probably help out. Bill comes home and talks to me and I said sure, it’s a great idea. He even says it can be his senior project. Great. We’ll have this thing knocked out before his senior year.

That was in the spring.

Summer rolls around and nothing has been decided on this makeover. Bill and I have a discussion that it would probably be best to wait and do this until after football season so that we get a few uninterrupted weeks of work without players there. Sounds good.

It’s late June now. I’ve been over at my Dad’s one Saturday. I come home that day and Bill informs me that he just decided to go on and start on the makeover.

You did what?

Keep in mind, this is the child who has spray painted his cleats multiple times now and never puts anything under them, so I have three different shades of cleat outlines on my garage floor.

I can tell he isn’t telling me everything, but he says he’s going to finish it and take care of it after FCA camp – which he leaves for the next day – he says I shouldn’t worry about it.

We drop him off at camp for the week.

Halfway through the week, I’m out in the front yard when his coach stops to talk (he lives in our neighborhood). The first words out of his mouth are, “Have you seen the locker room?”

At that point, I knew three things.

1. Obviously, the locker room was in bad shape.

2. My upcoming weekend was going to be spent in the locker room.

3. I was going to strangle that child.

I picked him up from FCA camp Thursday morning, promptly took him to the dentist for his scheduled root canal and then drug his butt to the locker room to work.

This is what I found, minus the plastic sheeting, I failed to take a picture when I first got there as flames were shooting from my fingertips, ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. Basically I was a human fireball.

With the exception of a few random newspapers scattered here and there, none of the benches or floor had been covered. None of the helmets or pads or lockers themselves had been cleaned out either.

Overspray from the spray paint coated everything.

I fed him some pain meds the doctor had given him and told him to get to work. Root canal or not, we had to fix and finish this locker room by Sunday because football started up again on Monday. We worked all Thursday afternoon, all day Friday, and all day Sunday (Saturday just happened to be the 4th of July) to finish the locker room.

He’s never started another project without me since.

Overall, the biggest thing I was worried about was the spray paint all over the floor. After we got all the lockers finished on Friday afternoon, I walked in there on Sunday armed with multiple scrub brushes, floor cleaner and my HomeRight Steam Machine.

I told Bill I was not cleaning up the mess he made, I would only supervise, so he’d better find help. Lucky for him, he has good friends, otherwise he’d been scrubbing for a looooong time.

This flooring was some sort of rubber flooring. We found the best way to remove the overspray was to wet it down with a mix of water and floor cleaner (that’s what’s in the big bucket) and scrub, then follow with bursts of steam and scrubbing from the Steam Machine.

It totally did the trick. The Steam Machine ate through any of the really tough spots on the flooring. Here’s a good idea of what we were dealing with…

The far left side has been scrubbed. The right side still has the overspray. Those straight lines of the overspray you see is where he had just thrown newspaper down. Randomly.

#SMH

After scrubbing with the Steam Machine, we did go back over the whole thing with a mop to pick up the scrubbed up spray paint residue.

And in the end, we did manage to get a pretty good looking locker room…