The Bain de Salle of my Existence

I just spent over an hour cleaning our bathroom – and I really didn’t even clean it all the way. It’s not a big bathroom. If you stood in the middle of it, you could stretch out your arms and touch from one wall all the way to the shower curtain on the other side of the room.

In addition to the usual cleaning, I had wanted to wipe the walls down, hang something above the door, install a curtain rod and put up the curtains I bought way back in December. No dice on any of those.

Granted, the bathroom was pretty foul. It had probably been close to a month ago when it was cleaned last. Yes, it’s embarrassing to type that out loud, especially since some of my friends read this blog, but I have to be honest.

Part of my problem is that, as messy and unorganized as I am, in my own special way, I’m also a perfectionist. So I don’t want to just give it the old whore’s bath; I feel like I want to give it the deep clean it deserves. Which takes time I haven’t made.

Another part is how completely frustrated I get cleaning the toilet. Not the inside – the outside. I have yet to find an effective way to clean it without just spreading the hair, lint and fuzz around. I’m not even talking the gross hairs. Just the usual head hairs and pet hairs, mixed in with plain, old, run-of-the-mill dust and carpet fuzz.

It drives me insane! I’ve looked it up on the Internet more than once to no avail.
Granted, I didn’t make it through all 1.6 million Google results. However, I have viewed a fair share and they all just say ‘wipe the outside’ without going into any great detail. Even my beloved Queen of Clean (more on her later) doesn’t even touch on it – her focus in on the interior bowl.

This floors me because, in my humble opinion, cleaning the inside is a no-brainer. Squirt in some cleaner, let it sit, scrub with a toilet brush, flush and voilá – it’s clean.

The way I usually go about cleaning the outside is like this: I spray the whole thing thoroughly with Scrubbing Bubbles. After they work their magic, I wipe the whole thing with a sponge just to get all the dirt, etc, loose and ready to be wiped away. Then I rinse out the sponge and wipe down part of the toilet. Then I rinse and repeat. Over and over and over again. And there’s still fuzz and stuff left on it!

My husband, Rick, swears by paper towels. I admit I liked the idea because using a sponge seems really gross, especially because I don’t want to use a new sponge every time I clean the toilet, as infrequently as that may be. So I decided to give it a whirl. 20 paper towels later, there were still some hangers-on and I just felt like a lot of the dirt must have dried on there because I wasn’t rinsing like I do with the sponge.

This may have been an error on my part; I’ll have to ask him if he ever returns from the basement. In the meantime, I’m looking for some tips on how to clean the outside of the toilet without wanting to throw it out the window. If you can help, please share.

Otherwise, I think I’ll rent “Singles” again. Maybe Kyra Sedgwick’s character was onto something when she used her ex-boyfriend’s favorite shirt to clean the toilet.