We were given a very nice Pac 'N Play by my brother-in-law and sister-in-law when Naomi was born. This one stays at my mom's house. She watches Naomi 2 days a week and Naomi uses this Pac 'N Play for nap time. Whenever we go out of town we have to get this from my parent's house (which is hard to remember!). So, one day I was driving to the grocery store and I saw a Pac 'N Play on the side of the road with a sign on it that said, "Free"... Yes, I know! But it was FREE!! So I pulled to the side of the road and loaded up my car. Here are the before pictures:
As you can see it's stained and pretty dirty. It had a funky smell to it as well. So I researched how to clean this and found many different opinions. I just decided to take a few of the ideas I found and combined them. I first soaked the outside part in the tub with a mixture of 1/2 cup of detergent, 1/2 cup of washing soda, 1/2 cup of vinegar and used hot water.
I let it soak for about 2 hours then flipped it. At the end of this washing cycle this is what the water looked like:
Ewwwww.........
I then rinsed it off with the shower head. Next I filled the tub again with cold water and 1/3 cup of bleach (to really kill anything nasty that could be on this). After the tub was filled I soaked the Pack 'N Play for 20 minutes on each side. Because the bleach is diluted in water it wasn't strong enough to fade any of the fabric.
Then I took it outside and sprayed it with the hose to make sure all the bleach was off. Then I dried it in the sun.
The next step was to wash and clean all of the other parts. The 'mattress' that goes in the bottom was a little tricky. There was no zipper so I couldn't easily take the cardboard pieces out of the mattress. I had to seam rip one side of it and take the cardboard pieces out.
As you can see there were two different seams I had to take out. The binding was first and the fabric pieces were second.
I slid all of the cardboard pieces out so I could wash the batting and fabric.
I did the same soak in hot water, detergent, washing soda, and vinegar for 3 hours. Rinsed it out, wrung the mattress, and bleach soak for 30 minutes.
I brought this all outside and rinsed it with the hose and let the sun dry the piece out. I had to let the outer part and mattress dry for 2 days because of the thickness of the material. Once everything was dry I put the cardboard pieces back in the mattress and sewed the two seams back together. The fabric seam was first (which I made bigger stitches for) and the binding (which I used smaller stitches).
As you can see it is much cleaner now and I feel comfortable with Naomi sleeping in it now. We went to the mountains recently with Jeff's family and it worked quite nicely for Naomi's bed. I actually want to try washing the other Pack 'N Play now just to see how clean I can get it ;). Hopefully this helps some of you out there whether you get a used Pack 'N Play or have had one for a while that just needs a little cleaning!
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