I’m Not Cooking Dinner Tonight.
I’ve spent the last four hours cleaning every bathroom in our house and I’ve learned one thing.
If I ever have a son, I might die because I don’t think I can handle the mess of two males using a bathroom. And Mr. How Sweet is a neat freak. Remember when he got MRSA back in January? Yeah, well I’m such a warm, loving and kind wife that I banished him to another bathroom to shower so we didn’t have to share. He’s been there ever since. It’s been kind of nice… but deep cleaning two showers is not nice. I cleaned all day and all I have to show for it?
A kitchen that is still a mess. At least the dishwasher is full.
[What is your best tip for keeping your house (especially bathrooms!) clean? Have a routine? Please share. And yes, I’ve already been to flylady.]
70 Comments on “I’m Not Cooking Dinner Tonight.”
Ughh, I totally know what you mean. I HATE cleaning. Baking is much more fun. ;-)
My beat tip is just give up. I wish I were joking!
Make that BEST tip – stupid iPhone!
I don’t clean until I lose something. Then I clean my apartment to find it. That’s true laziness right there. But I like to think of it as saving time. It’s just going to get messy again anyway!
My best tip is to have your husband do the cleaning….
We split up bathrooms duties: Jason cleans the showers and jacuzzi tub and I clean everything else.
Well, I have no idea what this FlyLady is so I clicked on it. And lo and behold, my Cozi calendar was on the front page. Which leads me to what I was going to tell you… the hubs and I use Cozi (www.cozi.com) to coordinate our lives. He (like most men) is calendar challenged. It syncs with our work computers and there is an app on our phones. Point is… I have a recurring appointment on the calendar to clean. One for him and all his tasks that he agreed to and one for my tasks. This way I don’t have to nag him and things get done. At least that was the agreement, 4 months in and he’s slacking :-) I told him when we started this experiment that if he started slacking, he was paying for a cleaning lady. I’m hoping he continues to slack.
I clean the bathrooms and Marshall does the rest. I am so lucky.
the best tip for cleaning bathrooms to keep them from getting just so disgusting and crusty is to….drumroll….clean them everyday. yeah really. NOT a good answer.
i finally broke down about a month ago and made up a cleaning/laundry schedule for the week. I have three kids (ages 6, 4 and 3) and it has been a Godsend!! I only have a few things that need to get done each day and it has benefited me in two ways – i spend a lot more time doing stuff with my kids (or *gasp* for myself) and when I am with my kids, I am not constantly thinking of all the stuff I SHOULD be doing. It has been awesome.
We have a cleaning lady that comes every 3 weeks and then I make the hubby clean the bathrooms on the weekends that are in the interim ;)
Mine gets pretty bad, pretty fast!
After we’ve used one hand towel for a couple of days, I’ll use it to quickly wipe down the counter and sink in the kitchen or bathroom before I put it in the laundry hamper. That helps to keep the most used surfaces clean until I can get around to scrubbing down the rest room!
I live in a really smart apartment, so it’s quick to clean, but quick to get messy. If I force myself to take 20-30 minutes to clean every day when I get home from work, before I let myself make dinner I find that it stays pretty manageable.
Or just hire a maid :)
Err…that was meant to say small, not smart. I can’t type apparently.
Ugh, tell me about it. Potty training my son.. Well for the first while was OK because he sat down, but eventually he needed to learn how to stand up. Then the bathroom needed a full cleaning every time he went pee, haha. Now that he can aim as much as a grown man(read: 75% of the time) I try to keep on it twice a week with quick cleans. Honestly, thank goodness we only have one bathroom. I might die if we had two.
My bathrooms are always a mess, but I’ve been told if you keep a regular routine of cleaning perhaps weekly that it keep it from getting too nasty. I do not do this, probably should!
Why are boys so dirty?
I always have some of those Clorox Wipes handy and I try to wipe down the bathroom counters/sink and toilet at the end of each day. Plus I do a full clean of my tiny bathroom every single week. Bathtub, floors, sink all of it!
It is a never ending battle!
My solution is to not clean it. One of my deepest desires is to have a glassy, smooth tub like my mother’s. All the showers I’ve had have been made of this weird scratchy material and you CANNOT clean it. Once it’s dirty, that’s it. It’s done.
I have that same type of tub. It NEVER looks clean and it drives me batty. I just wait for it to look grosser than normal because what is the point!
SO painful when men mess up the bathroom. I try to do a little bit at a time – like one bathroom at a time. I also try to continuously wipe down the sinks…that is the least effort for the most impact. As for the toilets? Let me know when you find a solution. Meanwhile, I’ll be wearing long rubber gloves with an extra long toilet brush, standing 5 feet away from the hazardous area.
Have kids and make them do it :)
I invite people for dinner so I have to clean the bathrooms….and the rest of the house.
well–i have 2 males…43 year old husband and an 18 (in just a few short weeks) yr. old son!!! i will have to say that you just kinda have to look over it!!! i had to make up my mind that they were more important to me than a spic-and-span bathroom~~so…i do my best!!!! the rest is history!!!LOL!!! no–really i just ask me teenager to use one bathroom so i only have to check one bathroom once or twice or three times a week!!!LOL!!!
Get a cleaning person for the bathrooms. I am trying hard to find someone good right now (first few attempts have been failures since I have high cleaning standards).
Aside from that the best thing to do is rinse the shower walls after every shower and wash the bathroom floors one time a week. Just rinsing the walls does a LOT to keep soap scum from building up, and I just run a swiffer wetjet on the floors at the minimum of once a week. Then once a month I get on my hands and knees and scrub the tiles well.
Girly girl…I live with two boys. And I feel your bathroom pain.
Keep Clorox wipes in the bathroom and give things a wipedown every day. It takes a few minutes. I CLEAN CLEAN it once, maybe twice a week. Shark Steam Vac is also a blessing for bathrooms.
We only have one bathroom so I *try* to do things every week like, clean the toilet/sink/mirror and swifter, and then once a month do a big job where I get on my hands and knees and clean the floor and scrub the shower.
Oh, the automatic shower cleaner by scrubbing bubbles is AMAZING. It really helps cut back the number of times I have to clean the shower. So that’s my best tip.. the automatic shower cleaner!
I do little cleaning as I go — when I get out of the shower and things are steamed up, I just wipe ’em down quickly (no cleaner needed that way), etc. And then, once a week, I just bite the bullet for 15 minutes and do a quick dust/toilet/bathroom tub cleaning. If you do it for 15 minutes once a week, it makes it so much easier on “deep clean” days!
My best advice for cleaning (or keeping it easy to clean) bathrooms is to do it regularly! Seems so obvious, but cleaning the toilet once a week or every other week is so much easier than waiting until it’s totally nast. If you wait, it always seems to take SO long with lot’s of elbow grease to get it really, really clean. I also wipe down the glass shower walls with a squeegee and then a small towel to get all the water drops to avoid hard water crust. Again, less scrubbing when the time comes to clean it. I’m all about doing it more often so it’s easier, faster… and most importantly less gross. I haaaaate scrubbing a nasty toilet or shower… kinda gives me the heebies. haha.
I have to clean the bathrooms everyday, I have two kids and a husband and it gets dirty fast. Really just do a light clean and pick-up and do all my hard scrubbing and cleaning on Saturday. Vinegar with warm water is a great thing to use on the bathroom floor especially around the toliet to get rid of any smells if you know what I mean :)
Um… maybe change your definition of “clean”. Not that I’m suggesting letting everything go to pot, but loosen up a bit. It’ll come in handy when you have little tornadoes in your house. All day.
OMG I need to clean.
I know you’re not going to like this, but my tip would be to clean once a week! Seriously, it does save you the stress and time of having to clean a super dirty bathroom. I try to wipe down the counter and sink everyday with a hand towel (or even tissues) to get rid of water spots. Then on the weekend I’ll scrub (which takes like 1 minute) the toilet, disinfect the counters, and mop the floor (I have a Swiffer, so easy). The only process takes about 10 minutes. As for the shower, I have a daily shower spray that saves me SO much time. I only clean the shower once every two weeks or so, it’s a lifesaver.
Yep, I’m on the once a week boat, too. We split up bathroom duty (sinks, mirrors, floors and toilet + tub) and do it weekly, which makes it a quick 15-30 minutes each weekend. :) Those Clorox toilet head things are fabulous!
I hate cleaning – SO many better things to be doing! Now that our son is old enough and has his own we keep Clorox wipes in there and he has to do a minimum of a weekly wipe down and then we try to do the “big clean” about once a month or so to get everything he misses. Yes, boys are gross – make sure if you have boy offspring they have their own bathroom and MAKE THEM CLEAN IT!! :D
Every day I wipe down the sink and the floors ,especially around the toilet.Then once a week I thoroughly clean my bathroom,add comet to the sink,toilet and tub let soak while I wipe down the mirror and fixtures,then scrub them clean swiffer the floor and done. Doesn’t take me more than 20 minutes,but we only have one bathroom.
well with a husband and two grandkids that live with us. I clean everyday. thankful for the clorox wipes. and now when the grandson make a mess I make him clean it. that helps alot because he get mad and it dosen’t happen as much. good luck
I have a husband and 3 boys: 6, 4 and 3 (either newly potty-trained or in the process still!). So, needless to say, our bathrooms are DISGUSTING! A friend shared this tip with me, and I swear it changed my life!
Fill a spray bottle with 1 part alcohol, 1 part water. I use this for cleaning both the kitchen and bathrooms (seperate bottles, though. Ew!). Put on latex gloves, spray down the toilet and wipe it with toilet paper. Then you can just flush it all away. It cleans and sanitizes and is really easy. Latex gloves are pretty cheap at Target or any drugstore, and if you have kids, trust me, they come in very handy!
I hate hate hate cleaning bathrooms! I dont really mind anything else…except that we just moved and now i have to wash ALL the walls…and its a biiggg house. Thank goodness for Magic Erasers!
I also buy clorox wipes and try and wipe the counters and toilet with one every day. It keeps the bathroom 90% cleaner. I also use hand towels that need washing to wipe the floor about 1 or 2 times a week.
I always squeegee the shower after I use it. It helps reduce build-up significantly. Also, my grandma uses a daily shower spray and that helps her… I’ve tried that, but the man never uses it and he showers twice as much as me (I’m kinda dirty…okay he showers a million times a week), so it defeats the purpose.
I clean the sink/counter area at least once a week. The mirror maybe gets cleaned once a month. The toilet gets cleaned whenever I feel like it (maybe once a week, maybe twice). The shower gets cleaned if a miracle occurs. Honestly, my SO’s response to “the shower curtain is getting a bit icky, we should clean it” was “we’ll buy a new one.” I pretend that the shower is full of hot water and soap daily, so it has to be clean, right? Also, living in dry climate makes bathscum and mold a much smaller problem.
After raising three boys (plus a hubby) the only advise I have is wipe the bathroom down everyday. Sorry it’s not a glamerous answer but it works. I kept Clorox wipes under the sink and would wipe everything down – it didn’t take hardly any time and it was SO worth the three minutes or so spent doing it. The tub/shower scrubbing I would do weekly (or so) with Scubbing Bubbles. Good Luck – you can do it!!
haha. I cleaned my oven today, so that meant pizza for dinner :) I am looking forward to reading all of these responses! My youngest 3 are all 4 years old or under and cleaning while they are awake is a joke!
I try to just swish the toilet brush a few times a week, and I uaully wipe down the sink with my washcloth after I’ve washed my face at night. The shower I have no ideas for…I have a clawfoot tub so I just replace the 360* shower curtain liner when it gets too gross!
Ugh. Cleaning bathrooms is my absolutely least favorite household chore. I loathe it – and I’m a neat freak. I try to do it every Friday night or Saturday morning, but sometimes I cry to my husband and beg him to do it for me. That usually works.
Eew. I hate cleaning bathrooms. So gross.
I don’t know if this is too weird for most people buuut… once a week I clean the shower while I’m actually in it. I keep a sponge in it and some Mrs. Meyers all purpose in there and do a quick scrub (before I scrub myself). Makes my life happy, and there’s never any real gunk to scrub or scrape! Also keeping disinfectant wipes on the sink (or somewhere visible) which reminds me to take a few seconds and wipe the sink area every few days. But I also LOVE cleaning. Everything. So I’m not sure how much this will help but I hope it does :) :)
I have always cleaned the showers while I’m taking a shower too. It saves time. :)
Just be careful not to use anything with bleach in it if you clean the shower while you are in it. A good friend of mine used a Clorox spray to clean her shower (while she was in it) and I had to take her to the emergency room several hours later because she couldn’t breath! She had an asthma like incident from the fumes! Not good!
I try to rinse the shower everyday, since I have a nozzle that detaches. That helps when I get to the real deep cleaning on the weekends!
Oh, honey, you don’t even want to know a little boy can do to a freshly cleaned bathroom. Mine is required to scrub around the base of the toilet nightly and you would THINK that might motivate better aiming, but you would be wrong.
*shudder*
I’m not the dutiful wife either!!!
Umm…hello, I live with 4 boys. My bathrooms are gross. I clean the toilets weekly. I don’t understand why it is SO difficult to aim into the toilet. I am constantly cleaning the floor and the walls, yes the WALLS! I think my 16 year old is the worst. Sigh. I look forward to when I only have 1 boy at home to clean up after. :)
Since I have three bathrooms and hubby uses everyone of them, I have a method. I clean two rooms a day which takes only a couple of hours or less. Then the rest of the day is mine. I find cleaning everything in one day leaves me so tired I cannot enjoy the week.. I know it sounds crazy but it works for me. Plus getting older is not a good thing. The energy is just not there. LOL Paulette
Hey! So I normally clean the toilets (just the bowl!) about every 2 weeks, that way it stays fresh. I’ll spray the shower at the same time, but let it sit for maybe 30 minutes or so and then if and when I shower, that’s when I scrub it. As for the tile (sink, and toilet base) I usually try to clean them once a month when I’m vacuuming or cleaning something else. I definitely break up the cleaning of the bathroom though, it’s too much at once! Good luck. PS: fill the sink with the soapy water you want to use on the tile and possibly the shower, it works wonders and makes life easier….just make sure to wash the toilet LAST!)
:)
I am sure someone has already said this, but my best tip for a perfectly clean bathroom always is… have someone else clean it. :)