Melt Sticky Grease Right Off Your Walls Using Common Kitchen Staples

Your walls are the backdrop to everything that happens in your home — which means they pick up just as much everyday life as your countertops, tables, and flooring. And that means walls can get just as dirty over time as the rest of your home's surfaces. Grimy fingerprints, spills and splashes of various liquids, and even sticky, greasy, and tough stains can wind up on your walls. If you're working with painted walls in particular, making those stubborn stains disappear can be particularly tricky, as many cleaning methods can leave behind visible damage. But melting sticky grease off your painted walls can be easy to accomplish; all you need are a couple of kitchen pantry staples like vinegar or baking soda to do the trick.

Painted walls aren't impossible to clean, but they do require special care. Even a bit of elbow grease in the form of scrubbing your painted walls can remove the paint if you're not careful. First, it's important to know what type of paint was applied to your colorful DIY accent walls and neutral whole-room color schemes. Different paints require different cleaning approaches. If you're working with flat or matte paint, you'll need to choose a gentle, nonabrasive cleaner because the paint isn't highly durable. If your paint has a sheen, like semi-gloss paints, it's more durable and can handle more frequent cleaning (plus other common happenings like moisture and stains). 

If you have walls covered with oil-based or latex paint and you need to remove grease stains, grab the bottle of vinegar that's hanging out in your pantry. A mixture of water, white vinegar, and dish soap will cut through stains without taking the paint along, too. This combination works thanks to vinegar's acidic nature, which can break down grease without also breaking down your paint.

If you're working with high-gloss or semi-gloss paint that's a bit hardier, baking soda is the perfect pick thanks to its abrasive nature and ability to dislodge stain particles better than your typical soap. Just mix baking soda with water to create a paste, apply that paste to any grease stains on your painted walls, and scrub gently with a soft cloth. If the grease is still sticking around, you can apply the paste a second time and let it sit for a few minutes before you scrub and wipe it away.

While you might be tempted to mix baking soda and vinegar into one cleaning solution, the two don't necessarily become more effective when blended, at least not on painted walls. In fact, the two common kitchen staples can cancel each other out when mixed together, which will leave you with an ineffective end result. And, like we mentioned above, baking soda's abrasive nature isn't exactly a fit for all paint types, so it's best to divvy the two up into separate solutions.