To Clean Stainless Steel

While living in university apartments across the country, we have come across our fair share of a few things: mainly, stainless steel sinks.  As you can tell from the picture, they are always quite scratched, and I find that stainless steel is really hard to clean.  Well, you know, a cleaning that will last through the next time you turn on the water.  I've tried the $30 bottles of special stainless steel cleaner (that always promises to turn rusty scrap steel into the sink equivalent of a shiny new car), basic soap and water, and myriad other things.  This week, I decided to try out a couple tips I found on blogs...and both of them work well!

This is what our sink looked like to begin with:

Not terrible, but really faded, filmy, and definitely lots of water spots (because of the lighting, it's hard to see ALL of the spots in the sink).  So...now we CLEAN!


For the first part, you will need two products that you probably already have: baking soda and salt.

When the sink is wet (like, say, after you finish the dishes!), sprinkle all over with baking soda and salt.  Mine looked like this after everything was on:

Using a wet sponge, scrub the sink.  The hardest part was scrubbing the sides of the sink because it's basically impossible to sprinkle the baking soda and salt onto the sides.  Anyway, scrub it all over!  I did the bottom, the sides, the stopper, the faucet, everything.  When everything has been scrubbed, rinse it with water.  At this point, it will be pretty clean...and if you want to stop here, you'll still have a clean sink!

For the next part, you will need:

An empty spray bottle (anything around the standard size of a Windex bottle)
1 cup water
1 cup vinegar
1 cup alcohol
Splash of olive oil

Pour all of the liquids in the spray bottle and flip it a couple times to mix.  Now you spray away and wipe off with a towel.  That's it!  If you want some extra shine, you can buff the sink with olive oil; however, I didn't have time to do that on this particular day.  So this was the finished product:

And the other side of our sink (I only used the spray on this side):

Make up some cleaner and have fun!  (By the way, the spray also works really well on hardwood floors)

If you have any tips on how to get scratches out of stainless steel, feel free to tell me about them so I can try them out!