LESLIE: Bobby in North Carolina is very busily trying to remove a red-wine stain from a kitchen floor. Did you have an awesome party or just a tipsy evening?
BOBBY: No. Well, I had a dinner party and I had a person who just actually – it had been raining outside and their shoes were a little slick and they had a glass of wine and was walking across and just slipped. Needless to say, this glass of red wine went all over our kitchen vinyl floor. And we thought we had it all cleaned up but about a day later, we saw this huge, red stain on the floor.
TOM: Oh, wow.
BOBBY: And we have tried OxiClean, we’ve tried a product called OOPS!, Goo Off, Clorox bleach. And nothing seems to even fade it.
TOM: Wow. Well, unfortunately, I suspect that since it sat on that overnight, that you may have absorbed into the vinyl or it may have been – have created a reaction, an oxidation between the – in the vinyl itself, which means it’s physically turned colors.
Sometimes, when you have a rubber mat in front of a kitchen, where you have one of those little kitchen rugs and people stand on it while they’re washing dishes and so on, you pull that up you get what looks like a stain underneath.
BOBBY: Right.
TOM: But it’s really not a stain; it’s a chemical reaction between the rubber that’s in the mat and the vinyl that’s in the floor. I wonder, to myself, whether that could have happened from the wine and the alcohol and the grapes that are in that wine, whether it actually physically changed the color of the vinyl, in which case there’s really no stain left; that’s the color of the vinyl. It just has changed and now it’s not pleasant anymore.
LESLIE: Is it an area you can cover with a rug?
BOBBY: Well, unfortunately not. And I don’t – I really hate to – in this townhouse, we’ve just moved there and I hate to have to tear up a whole floor and have it replaced. But if you were going to recommend a product to even see if it would fade it or take it up, is there something other than what I’ve used you would recommend?
TOM: Bobby, when you tried bleach on this, did you simply just try to sort of wipe it on, wipe it off kind of a thing?
BOBBY: I did the first time and then I actually poured some Clorox bleach in the area and just sort of let it set there for three or four minutes and then tried wiping it up. But nothing changed the color at all.
TOM: OK. So what you might want to try to do is to dilute the bleach with water in a ratio of about one part bleach to four parts water. And then soak a towel in this. Get it nice and wet and then lay that rag with the bleach mixture in it over the stain and let it sit there for about an hour.
BOBBY: OK.
TOM: And let’s see if that tends to pull it out.
BOBBY: Alright. Well, I greatly appreciate your help.
TOM: You’re welcome. Good luck with that project. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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