It’s good to be back in the saddle of writing after such a long hiatus from moving to another state. Is my house painting done yet? No. But running across this issue inspired me to take pictures and tell everyone about the struggles of removing what seemed like the impossible.

The Back Story

In between my family moving into another home farther south, my girlfriend also needed help packing/moving too. So I’d travel back up to NC on weekends. On one of the weekends we were packing/sorting where I went to go reach for a coffee mug on top of her built-in desk in her den. It literally didn’t budge. I grabbed with two hands, pulling with everything I had in strength and weight, and it still refused to budge.

My girlfriend explained what had happened: She had several stress balls over the many years working in an office environment and after retirement, she had a few leftover at her home. She didn’t know the exact time frame of when the liquid stress ball broke open upon her desk. But when she found it (likely many days later), she realized it had glued her coffee mug, paper tray, a ceramic whale, and a battery pack to the hardwood desk top. She had no success getting it removed. Fast forward many months, she tells me the story and I am not one to give up. She’s trying to sell her home and items glued to a built-in desk just wouldn’t do.

My Plan of Attack

First, I had to figure out what kind of liquid was used in stress balls back in the nineties. It appeared we weren’t the only ones struggling to get the oozing-stress-ball-turned-solid-mass off of things. A few Reddit posts had people asking the same questions. But the information people shared was for rug or fabric surfaces and not a hardwood desk that needed to be unharmed in the process.

The Ingredients Often Used in the Gel Stress Balls of the Nineties

According to Play Inc. of the UK and Poison Control, the main ingredients in those liquidity stress balls can be a few different things:

• Water and Glycerin, a fluid combo that provided resistance while squeezing the ball.
• Maltose or Corn Syrup, that provided a pleasurable slow-ooze effect.

While none of these liquids would seem to change into a hardened substance that worked better than Super Glue, it did. To make matters worse, it dried clear. Once it oozed around an object and dries, it’s hard to distinguish where the substance begins and ends.

The Supplies Needed to Remove the Hardened Substance Off of a Wood Surface

• A Roll of Paper Towels
• A Non-Harsh, Essential Oil-Based Cleaner (safe for sealed wood) Ex. Mrs. Myers Lilac All Purpose Cleaner (not concentrated)
• A Razor Blade Scraper

Directions: With your spray bottle of cleaner, wet down the hardened areas/items involved. If working on a wood surface, do not let the wood stay wet for more than a minute or two before using a paper towel to start lifting off a layer of the hardened ball gel, and drying any over-sprayed areas. After repeating several times, the hardened areas will turn into a syrupy layer that a paper towel can remove. But because of the nature of the gel, it hardens back quickly, and you’ll be able to use the scraper and paper towel between applications. Being careful to not damage the wood, it took me about an hour and a half of spray, wipe, use blade to pull off a layer, and repeat. But it was worth the effort.

Photos provided by E. Apple, All Copyrights Reserved, 2026.The image directly below this paragraph was everything glued solid to the wood. The image at the bottom is how the desk looked once the objects were able to be removed and the desk cleaned off.