There’s pretty much nothing I like less than cleaning the bathroom. There’s just too much room for nasty. So usually I do it as infrequently as possible. With two boys and I sharing one aging bathroom, though, it’s reached a severe level of gross on my homeland hygiene monitoring system. Red alert. Mental alarms sound. I would caution visitors not to use the hand towel.
The guys wouldn’t think to address this sorry state of affairs until the things sprouting in the corners grow teeth, and besides, I usually make them take out the garbage. So I grab my trusty scrubby sponge and set to work. I take it one step at a time, and I start with the worst first: the shower.
Last time I was at the hardware store, I bought very thick rubber gloves because I knew this day would come. I snap them on. I open the shower door and take a good look at the floor. It’s worse than I thought, with brown stuff growing in the grout, hair stuck beneath the drain grate.
I remove all of our shampoos and their cousins from the shower. I scoop up the hair. I take a deep breath and squirt Soft Scrub all over every surface. I use almost the whole bottle. I let it sit. After a few minutes, I return with my sponge and scrub away.
Our shower is a small square stand-up with a fixed head, which turns out to be a problem when I try to rinse away the excess cleanser–I can’t remove the head to focus on hard to reach corners. What’s a girl to do? I don’t own a bucket. I go to the kitchen, but the largest thing I can find in the recycling bin is a liter mineral water bottle. It will have to suffice. I fill it up and wash down the sides of the shower, one liter at a time.
Exhausted, I decide that I have had enough cleaning for one day. I replace the shampoo bottles, remove my gloves, and collapse on the couch. The toilet will have to wait for another day.
