Your No-Sweat Guide to Spring Cleaning
My New Favorite Hack to Get the Bathroom Sparkling Clean
Hint: It has something to do with a drill...
Welcome to Your No-Sweat Guide to Spring Cleaning, a month-long series that puts the fun (yep, for real!) back into cleaning. We’re talking spruce-ups that take less than five minutes, why-didn’t-I-think-of-that hacks, and hands-off cleaning tasks that basically…do themselves—plus our trustiest tools and helpers. The goal: clean less, go outside more.
I have been known to attack the bathtub with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser at a moment’s notice (and by “known,” I mean about five people in total). Still, it could be said that I have found my calling in an unplanned scrub session. This usually involves not putting my hair up first (“I’m just going to get this one smudge”), forgetting to change out of my ~good sweatpants~, and becoming entirely so sweaty during a commercial break that I end up missing the rest of The Bachelor because I now need to clean myself in the room I just cleaned. Phewf.
While I really love the effectiveness of a Magic Eraser on soap scum, I really don’t love the mostly single-use-ness of it (they disintegrate quite quickly while using), and I really, selfishly, don’t love how much physical labor is involved. I swapped the eraser out with baking soda and vinegar a while back (truly, just as effective), but I was still searching for the “lazy girl” way out of scrubbing.
Then, one day it dawned on me: I bet there’s a scrub brush attachment I can put on my drill, reducing the load on my (weak) arms and increasing SPS (scrubs-per-second). Low and behold, it exists! A 4-piece set costs $10, and they ship in two days. Huzzah!
Despite the knowledge that the Amazon truck comes twice a day (at approximately 1pm and 6pm, which I figured out thanks to quarantine), and I had text tracking updates—I still paced around, eager for my soon-to-be hero product. This level of cleaning-excitement is not the case for everyone, of which I am acutely aware. I do know, however, that making a cleaning task easier and less painful (for real, I need a heating pad for my lower back after a bathroom scrub) is something we can surely all get behind.
When they finally arrived (yay!), I got to work. To set the record straight: my bathtub is yellow, which already makes it look somewhat… dingy. To make matters worse, it’s covered in rows of textured polka dots, presumably for traction, but if we’re presuming, then I’m going to guess they were put there to keep me up at night. Since they’re not slick like the rest of the tub, these dots have a habit of collecting dirt, so I know the tub needs a clean when they start to become more apparent. Fun!
I sprinkled a generous amount of baking soda on the floor of the tub, readied my vinegar in one hand and drill in the other, and… oh baby. I’ll just leave you with the before and after, and tell you to try it yourself.
Oh, and by the way, this tool isn’t limited to just bathtub-scrubbing. It would be just as satisfying to use on tile floors, gunky shower grout, dirty patio furniture, greasy hubcaps, and even crusted pots and pans. The applications are seemingly endless and I look forward to discovering them all.
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Written by: Caroline Mullen
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17 Comments
Using Lysol bathroom FOAM or even Scubbing Bubbles made the restroom toilet, sink, tub and especially the grout and ceramic floors look new and sparkle!
Simple spray on a small 24x24" section, allow to sit 15 minutes, then using a medium brissil scrub brush, scrub, followed by wiping with warm water to remove suds. On the grout lines, usually 20 back and forth strokes will have them "white" after drying. The high traffic areas may need to be done a couple times. Love It!
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