Day 2 Action Plan:
1. Clean shower
2. Clean garden tub
3. Clean door
4. File loose papers
5. Sweep and mop and clean baseboards
Our shower has been a source of frustration for me ever since we moved into this house. Seriously...when we first looked at it a few years ago, I told My Love that I hated the back yard (which has a steep incline and is therefore nearly unusable as a back yard) and that I hated the stand-up shower. The price was right, though, so we figured that the two areas I disliked could be amended later. As it turns out, those fixes are costly and time-consuming, and it's been much easier to simply live with things the way they are. But I digress.
This shower...it's small. It's not a luxury stand-up shower, with a seat. It barely leaves room for me to shave my legs. It's just the right size for ONE person. There is no shelf space for shampoos, shaving creams, soaps, gels, and all the other things women store in their shower. And on top of that, it's very difficult to clean. You basically have to assume that you WILL get wet while leaning across the water stream to reach the far wall, so I've found that a sound technique is to clean the shower immediately before I plan to get in it. Today, this meant cleaning it at 6:00 in the morning after returning from my a.m. run. I doused it with the scrubbing bubble spray and left to have a glass of water. When I returned ten minutes later, I was able to simply wipe down the majority of the unsightly gunk that had accumulated. Really, I am consistently amazed by how dirty a shower can get when its entire purpose is to clean someone. Between the dirt that washes off after My Love mows the lawn (which sticks to the floor), my hair clogging the drain (it's coming out in wads postpartum), soap scum (which is strange in and of itself), and dust along the top edges, our shower always seems dirty. After I scrub it, I always want to scrub myself! Today, though, the scrubbing bubbles did the job quickly, except that I had to go over some particularly tough soap scum a second time. I also heard that you can use a dryer sheet to get soap scum off of shower doors, but I forgot to try it this time until after the cleaning was done. Next time I'll give it a shot.
Next came the huge garden tub. It's nice for a bubble bath, but I don't have the time for that very often. I cleaned this with my scrubbing bubble cleaner too, and I learned a hard lesson: it has bleach in it. In order to reach the back side of the tub, I had to sit on the front side...and, apparently, the scrubbing bubbles hadn't been completely removed when I did. I ended up with a few little white polka dots on my lavender (yep, you read that right) shorts. (I think I can salvage them; apparently you can paint with bleach and make it look like you meant for that to happen. I may try it in all my spare time.) The biggest issue I had with cleaning the tub, though, is that when My Love painted the bathroom a few years ago, he left lots of tiny (pin-head-sized) flecks of paint on the tub. It always looks dirty now, but I can't figure out a way to get them off. Then again, I haven't tried mineral spirits...that is sort of out of my league, and we don't have any in the house.
We store our file cabinet in this random corner of our oversized bathroom that's not good for anything else. It's a closet-sized nook in the bathroom behind the door, and it's got a small window in it. Basically, that means that it's always either ten degrees hotter or colder than the rest of the room. Because it's out of the way, it has been a convenient place to store my Sam's Club purchases (36-roll package of toilet paper, anyone?) and the file cabinet. But...since no one sees the file cabinet, it's been easy to just pile papers on top of it until I feel like filing. And the last time I felt like it was back before David was born. So I took a break from the heady fragrance of the bathroom and sorted all my papers to file on the bed, then found them a permanent home. Again, the visible lack of clutter and sense of order gave me a big boost that allowed me to keep on with my cleaning.
And finally...the floor. One more set of baseboards gone over with a Lysol wipe; one more application of my fantastic Libman broom and mop, paired with ACV. (I've got this down to an art.) After two days of effort, the master bathroom smelled, looked, and felt cleaner than it has in months!
Our shower has been a source of frustration for me ever since we moved into this house. Seriously...when we first looked at it a few years ago, I told My Love that I hated the back yard (which has a steep incline and is therefore nearly unusable as a back yard) and that I hated the stand-up shower. The price was right, though, so we figured that the two areas I disliked could be amended later. As it turns out, those fixes are costly and time-consuming, and it's been much easier to simply live with things the way they are. But I digress.
This shower...it's small. It's not a luxury stand-up shower, with a seat. It barely leaves room for me to shave my legs. It's just the right size for ONE person. There is no shelf space for shampoos, shaving creams, soaps, gels, and all the other things women store in their shower. And on top of that, it's very difficult to clean. You basically have to assume that you WILL get wet while leaning across the water stream to reach the far wall, so I've found that a sound technique is to clean the shower immediately before I plan to get in it. Today, this meant cleaning it at 6:00 in the morning after returning from my a.m. run. I doused it with the scrubbing bubble spray and left to have a glass of water. When I returned ten minutes later, I was able to simply wipe down the majority of the unsightly gunk that had accumulated. Really, I am consistently amazed by how dirty a shower can get when its entire purpose is to clean someone. Between the dirt that washes off after My Love mows the lawn (which sticks to the floor), my hair clogging the drain (it's coming out in wads postpartum), soap scum (which is strange in and of itself), and dust along the top edges, our shower always seems dirty. After I scrub it, I always want to scrub myself! Today, though, the scrubbing bubbles did the job quickly, except that I had to go over some particularly tough soap scum a second time. I also heard that you can use a dryer sheet to get soap scum off of shower doors, but I forgot to try it this time until after the cleaning was done. Next time I'll give it a shot.
Next came the huge garden tub. It's nice for a bubble bath, but I don't have the time for that very often. I cleaned this with my scrubbing bubble cleaner too, and I learned a hard lesson: it has bleach in it. In order to reach the back side of the tub, I had to sit on the front side...and, apparently, the scrubbing bubbles hadn't been completely removed when I did. I ended up with a few little white polka dots on my lavender (yep, you read that right) shorts. (I think I can salvage them; apparently you can paint with bleach and make it look like you meant for that to happen. I may try it in all my spare time.) The biggest issue I had with cleaning the tub, though, is that when My Love painted the bathroom a few years ago, he left lots of tiny (pin-head-sized) flecks of paint on the tub. It always looks dirty now, but I can't figure out a way to get them off. Then again, I haven't tried mineral spirits...that is sort of out of my league, and we don't have any in the house.
We store our file cabinet in this random corner of our oversized bathroom that's not good for anything else. It's a closet-sized nook in the bathroom behind the door, and it's got a small window in it. Basically, that means that it's always either ten degrees hotter or colder than the rest of the room. Because it's out of the way, it has been a convenient place to store my Sam's Club purchases (36-roll package of toilet paper, anyone?) and the file cabinet. But...since no one sees the file cabinet, it's been easy to just pile papers on top of it until I feel like filing. And the last time I felt like it was back before David was born. So I took a break from the heady fragrance of the bathroom and sorted all my papers to file on the bed, then found them a permanent home. Again, the visible lack of clutter and sense of order gave me a big boost that allowed me to keep on with my cleaning.
And finally...the floor. One more set of baseboards gone over with a Lysol wipe; one more application of my fantastic Libman broom and mop, paired with ACV. (I've got this down to an art.) After two days of effort, the master bathroom smelled, looked, and felt cleaner than it has in months!
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