How do I clean my bathtub?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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High explosives are much more fun than moving.

OK, you’d pretty much need to move anyway at that point, what with the FBI being after you and all… :smiley: Maybe elbow grease would be a better idea.

[hijack]Before we got married, Papa Zappa shared an apartment with some other males. The bathtub pretty much never got cleaned except when a girlfriend stayed over. Which in a group apartment situation wasn’t all that often. The last time I cleaned it, large chunks of mildew came off the walls of the tub. It was not pleasant. :eek: [/hijack]

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Are you related to Riff?

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Will crap come off when you scratch a fingernail across the surface?

Keep a scrub brush in there and scrub a few minutes every time you take a shower. Don’t scrub hard or long, but make sure you cover all the surfaces. Do this for two weeks. At the end of two weeks take a critcal look at the shower and see what you think.

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They’re kind of expensive, but I have found those Mr. Clean “erasers” work pretty good for getting off the dark soap scum stain on the bottom of the tub.

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  1. I understand that mildew is little living things that want to spread over everything and everyone.

  2. I understand that evolution is a process whereby organisms adapt to their environment in order to better spread over everything and everyone.

  3. I’m worried that the escalation of cleaning products over five distinct recombined species will result in everything Ending Badly.

  4. This also sounds like hard work. I’d rather avoid hard work and read Mike Hammer novels if possible, but I’m doing this as a potential aid to my sex life and may have to forego One Lonely Night before the other person gets back.

  5. I think painting over it would be easier.

Being a health-food kind of guy, I’m intrigued by this baking soda thing. Please tell me more.

Can I use the hydrogen peroxide as a replacement for the bleach/comet/garage floor cleaner? How well does it work? At least this way when my mouth starts foaming, I’ll know that it’s not too bad.

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If you ha… I mean, if your friend has never done this before, then why start now?

Hire someone to clean for you. May be costly, but at least you’re pretty much guaranteed that no f*ck-ups will occur.

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If your friend is averse to heavy scrubbing, perhaps this friend could hire a cleaning service this one time. Sort of like Keapon’s idea but a bit more friendly to the wallet.

Baking soda is great, but salt is good for very grungy surfaces you don’t have to worry about scratching.

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Try one of these with cheap shampoo on it. :smiley:

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Those things will clean ANYTHING!!! That was going to be my responce, but I just get to 2nd…okay, 3rd Delores’s sugestion.

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I use powder Tide.

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I use Flash or Cif or one of those cream cleaners, put it on a sponge and wipe it all around the bath. Hard. Then leave for 5 mins and rinse off. Wipe again, harder.

There is no way of avoiding elbow grease, with enough effort even plain old baking soda can clean a tub (you make it into a thick paste with a little water and scrub it all over the tub).

For the toilet- pour bleach down it and flush immediately, then pour more bleach down it, under the rim too, and leave overnight, then flush in the morning. Get a new cloth (henceforth the toilet cloth, never used for anything except the toilet) put a big dose of bathroom cleaner or disinfectant on it and wipe the entire toilet, and seat from the outside working in. Then either throw the cloth away, put it in a boil wash or soak it in boiling hot water mixed with disinfectant.

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Because of environmental concerns, TSP is no longer available in a lot of states. Here in Sector R, I’ve seen “TSP Substitute” in the hardware stores, but I don’t know whether it’s any good or not. Apparently, it’s sodium carbonate. Anyone know whether it works?

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Make paste of baking soda and water. Apply with damp sponge. If you want to kill the mildew, use borax and water. Easy, cheap and green.

Yes, you can use Hydrogen peroxie to replace other cleansers. It works best with cream of tartar, like I mentioned above. If you let it sit a while, it works great. Most “green” cleaners work just as well as the store stuff if you leave them on a while. They are better for you, for the environment, and cheaper to use.

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Isn’t borax slightly toxic? I know it’s used for laundry, but I also use it to kill fire ants. (Grind borax and sugar together with just a little water so the grains are well-mixed, maybe add some flavouring, and put out a spoonfull near the mound. Ants will take it home to the queen, they say. It seems to work.) Should we be putting that down our drains?

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My understanding is that boric acid (Borax) kills insects by abrading away the exoskeleton and causing them to dehydrate. And since it’s approved for use in laundry, it’s already going down our drains.

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Slightly toxic, yes, but definitely greener and safer than bleach or ammonia. I do most of my cleaning with baking soda, vinegar and soap (that’s S-O-A-P, not detergent). I use borax for disinfecting and washing soda for grease removal.

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OK, trying the baking soda thing first. If that doesn’t work, I’m moving up to some Lysol stuff I found under the sink. If that doesn’t work, I’ve got the number for a cleaning service.

You may not hear from me again. Unfortunately, you won’t know if it was because it didn’t work…or it worked too well.

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Everything has trade offs. If the job is overwhelming because it’s gone too far and it’s going to take an enormous expenditure on cleaning supplies, you’re going to have to psych yourself up for days, and moving or blowing things up don’t seem out of line, then here is my suggested SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for this type of emergency.

Step 1: Admit defeat and give up. Wave a white flag if you must, but don’t do it in the direction of the tub, lest it look like a cleaning rag.

Step 2: Get a glass of wine and have a seat with the phone book.

Step 3: Look up a local house keeping service.

Step 4: Call one and tell them it’s an emergency. I say pick a local business run from a home rather than “Merry Maids” or something more expensive. But it’s your call.

Step 4: Turn on the tv and refill your wine.

Step 5: Get out of your chair and let the cleaner in. Offer him/her a glass of wine.

Step 6: Write a check and give them a fat tip for saving you from explosives, fumes, and the cost of hiring movers.

Step 7: Take a bath in your clean tub. With the wine, of course.

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Actually, that wasn’t too bad. I finaly got to the grocery store to pick up some stuff I’d been meaning to (although I forgot the damn garbage bags again) and wasn’t wondering if the fumes were corroding my optic nerves.

I used the baking soda, you see.

Round 1: Steamed up the bathroom nice and good. Thought about sitting around in a towel and muttering in Russian, but realized that I had work to do.

Round 2: Mixed water and what little baking soda I had in the **Chairwoman’s ** nice mixing bowl. Slopped it around. This wasn’t going to be enough.

Round 3: Went to the nice little grocery store where they actually do sit around in towels and mutter in Russian. Picked up some 10% vinegar (that’s the hardcore m’fucking shit version. The sign said so) and eight pounds of baking soda (it was on sale, you see).*

Round 4: Using some particularly scientific measuring (“ooh, that’s nice and sludgy. Gross. Ha ha! Bubbles…oh, no more bubbles. More baking soda! Ha ha, bubbles”), I slopped the mixture all around and took off to read a little bit of The Big Kill.

Spillane’s a great writer, especially when he really gets into his descriptions (I’ve noticed his mostly in his 1952ish books). As you read it, it sounds great, but when you go back and look it over, it seems baroque bordering on rococo. Somehow, it all works. I have to say, that these opening few pages match the first paragraph of My Gun is Quick and that other one where he comes back from being a spy in Germany, stumbles around drunk, shoots some guy and screws Velda. Brilliant.

Round 5: I start scrubbing with a normal sponge. It’s going much better than I anticipated. I have a cut on my finger I forgot about and the vinegar stings a little and I’m just waiting for my knuckles to turn to hamburger, so I stupidly break out the:

Round 6: Chore-Boy scrubbing pad. This worked marginally better than the spongs and it hurt a little more (I have tender little girl-hands). I think it has something to do with the sponge conforming to the shape of the tub and keeping more baking soda against the surface.

Round 7: I’ve been putting off exercising lately, but this should be a good isometric/endurance workout for the ol’ back and pecs. Considering that I’m also in my tighty-whities, I wonder if I could market a service where dirty old men get to watch nubile young guys like me scrub their tubs. Considering that I’ve only got two days until the ol’ lady comes back, I don’t think I have enough time to even put together a business plan.

Post-fight analysis: Man, was that thing dirty. **Chairman ** boxes clever, wins all rounds on points and doesn’t look the worse for the wear. I didn’t take note of how long I was scrubbing, but all told, it was a twoish hour endeavor (which includes breakfast breaks). Now that I’ve got the stuff, it should take even less time.

So, in eighteen months, I’ll give it another shot.

  • Holy Christ, I didn’t realize all the cool things you could do with baking soda (aside from watching the bathtub bubble over and nearly overflow!). I’ll have to investigate some other uses. Who needs crappy cleaning shit when you’ve got this stuff?
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Ever read any Jim Thompson? I’m addicted and buy up anything of his I can find. If you like Spillane, you may already be a Thompson fan.