Given that the bathroom is a place in which cleaning takes place every day, it is a surprisingly hard place to get clean! Would you know it, the products and water that people use to wash themselves, actually make the room extremely dirty, and extremely quickly! Soap scum, water residue and lime scale all contribute to making the bathroom an extremely difficult spot to get looking really clean, so a little advice on how to go about the bathroom cleaning may well be all you need to get going...First off, spray down the surfaces with serious build up with vinegar a good hour or so beforehand. Vinegar will eat through limescale and soap scum if given the chance, all it needs is time and quantity. If you can get the shower head off, place it in a bowl of vinegar overnight and you will find it is bright and shiny looking by the morning! Cling film wrapped around vinegar soaked taps can be a good way of doing the same for a fitting that can’t be removed. For the spraying, you will likely have to remove all of the product bottles and packets from the various surfaces that they inhabit. This is good practice, as they can be extremely dirty themselves; throw away empty bottles and wipe down those that are in use, to prevent them from immediately making the surface that they are on dirty. If you have no need for vinegar soaks and the like, then you can simply apply cream cleaner or bathroom cleaning spray to the surfaces around the room. You will find that if you cover all the surfaces and areas that require this spray in one go, then you will be ready to go with the first one that you sprayed by the time you have finished the last. The chemicals in these cleaning products need time to work if they are going to do their job effectively, and it is essential that you give it that time, as otherwise you will be wasting a lot of effort overall. Use a rough sided sponge or scrubbing brush to work the spray into a lather, and really put your back in to it when you are up against tougher sections of residue. The harder you scrub, the less time it will take to break down, though sometimes it is easy to despair that it will never come away! Having covered the surfaces, you can move on to the fittings, which will likely just need a wipe down and a buff to get them shiny, especially if you have had them soaking in vinegar. It is important that you always get the surfaces and the fittings as shiny as possible, as once you start allowing them to be a little duller each time, you are starting down a slippery slope by which you will end up never getting them back to their original brilliance. The final steps of cleaning the mirrors and windows with window or glass cleaner, and reassembling the piles of bottles in the shower or on the side of the bath are fairly straight forward. As with everything, make sure that all of the cleaning is done before you mop the floor, as otherwise you may be slopping dirty water all over the clean floor! Doing things in order like this makes sense, you should do the tiles above the bath before the bath, as otherwise you’ll undo all your hard work!
