Many working mothers have a dream. This dream is to be able to wake up in the morning, go downstairs to a beautiful kitchen wearing a comfortable robe, feed the kids a hearty breakfast, wave them off happily to school, and go leisurely off to work. When you return in the afternoon, the house is spotless and clean, and you can simply sit down and spend time with your happy, docile, perfectly behaved children. Sounds like the perfect advertisement for a breakfast cereal, doesn’t it? Yet for most working women, the reality is, shall we say, rather different.
Most of us come home to breakfast dishes piled in the sink (if we’re lucky) and a disgusting, foul-smelling bathroom, with towels still left on the floor after the morning’s hasty showers. No one bothered to pick them up because everyone was in a hurry to leave, and you also had no time to clean up before you rushed off to work.
So what is the secret of a clean bathroom when you are living on a tight schedule, leaving early, coming home late, helping your kids with their homework, making supper, doing the bedtime rush, and then hardly any time left for anything?
Here are some tips that might help:
- As soon as you get up in the morning, clean the toilet. It only takes a few minutes. Similarly, make it a personal household rule to clean the toilet just before you go to bed at night.
- Teach good bathroom habits to your children. Whoever takes a bath or shower should always be responsible for taking their dirty laundry to the hamper and hanging up towels afterwards.
- Once a week, check the bath for any hairs that might clog the drain. It is also useful to put a little drainer on top of the plughole to catch any stray dirt that could accumulate in the pipes.
- Wash your shower curtains regularly – and if they start to stink of mold, replace them immediately. A new shower curtain can change the mood of a bathroom very easily.
- Paint the walls and ceiling of your bathroom with a good waterproof paint. This prevents mold and peeling paint, and you hopefully won’t have to repaint for a very long time.
- Get a good area rug for your bathroom. A little oval rug or a rug made from polypropylene or acrylic is especially useful. You may also put down a bamboo rug if you want a more natural look.
- Keep the bathroom well ventilated to keep out damp or moldy smells. If you can’t keep a window open or a fan on for most of the day, leave the door open while everyone is out just to let some air in.
- Use toilet fresheners inside the toilet bowl. They really are worth the slightly extra expense and keep away bad toilet smells.
Following these rules does not mean that you will have a perfect bathroom. But it will certainly make it a more pleasant place to come home to.
