Cleaning is far from one of my favourite activities. I don’t like clearing food scraps from kitchen sinks and I don’t like sweeping crumbs off tables. In general, I dislike having to touch messes, and usually this doesn’t affect my day-to-day life. I do some general cleaning when I have to even if I hate it. I don’t live in filth.
Enter my one cleaning downfall: the bathroom.
During the fall semester, I shared a bathroom with one of my female roommates. I kept my stuff in one space, she kept hers in another. We traded off who bought toilet paper and I would occasionally do a cursory clean.
This was my first mistake. Instead of just spending a handful of minutes wiping things down, I should have been more thorough.
My second mistake was not asking my roommate to also clean. I should have very specifically asked for this for one particular reason: the shower.
Our shower was a standard shower-bathtub combination. The shower head was a little funky and would only spray properly if twisted a certain way, but that’s what gave it character. For all intents and purposes, it was a good shower.
Unfortunately for me, my roommate didn’t think cleaning the shower was all that important. Or so I’m led to believe based on the mess I was made to clean up, with the help of my father, god bless him.
Words cannot begin to describe the scene that was left in the shower when my roommate moved out. I had moved back home for a bit due to COVID, so I knew the shower had been a little messy before I left. You know, loose hair that really should have been thrown in the garbage, a little scum build-up. Things a brief clean would take care of.
I came back to massive amounts of hair plastered up the sides of the tub, a bread tie in the shower drain that was strongly clogged by hair and a browning shower curtain. Yes, you heard me. The bottom of our typically white shower curtain was somehow going brown. In the month I had gone away, our shower was a mess. Not to mention, the mirror was covered in spit particles from flossing too closely.
This was the bathroom that you could not tell I had dyed my hair in. The occasional cleaning I had done had no impact on the disaster I had come back to.
So with the help of my father, we set to work deep cleaning the entire bathroom. Windex-ing the mirror, wiping down the countertop, cleaning the bathtub, the whole nine yards. We had to use oven cleaner to get the hair and scum off the sides of the bathtub — oven cleaner.
The shower curtain was straight up thrown away.
It took just under two hours to get the bathroom back to the state it was when I had first moved in.
Now, you might be wondering why any of this matters, because surely this is just one horror story of a roommate with bad hygiene habits. Why should you deep clean your bathroom when it’s nowhere near as bad as mine was?
Simple. To prevent it from ever getting that bad. Your mirror and countertops are probably a little dirty, your shower drain is slowly clogging up and the sides of your shower have a little residue from soap and water. Clean it all and make it shine. Otherwise, the slow decline to mess will happen right before your eyes and by the time you finally do something about it, it’ll take ages.