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Ingenious Bathroom Cleaning Solutions: The Floors

Cleaning a bathroom comes with many facets. This is a place that involves both waste disposal as well as hygiene. There’s a delicate balance in keeping the facilities for those things well-cleaned. One of the areas of the bathroom that gets regularly neglected is the floor. The fact is, the floor of the bathroom is one of the most important parts to clean adequately. Here are some bathroom cleaning solutions on how to care for it. And, remember, one of the most important times to clean the bathroom floor is after you’ve had plumbing work done.

Why the Floor Matters

You might be wondering why the bathroom floor is one of the most important elements to clean. The reason is, every time you enter the bathroom, any bacteria on the floor gets on your feet. It’s then tracked into the rest of the house when you leave. Your feet don’t just go on the floor either. If you lie down in bed or curl up on the couch, it will be spread to those places too. Plus, the bathroom floor doesn’t just harbor plain bacteria – it usually has fecal particles on it. So, if you don’t want what’s on your bathroom floor to be spread to the rest of the house, you have to clean the bathroom floor adequately.

Your bathroom floor is liable to get bacteria-filled water on it during cleaning. Because of that, it’s best practice to save the floor for last, when using these bathroom cleaning solutions.

Sweeping

Because of the aforementioned spread of bacteria when things contact your bathroom floor, it’s recommended to keep a separate broom for the bathroom floor. Cheap brooms can be bought for only a few dollars. This broom is best stored in a laundry room or other place away from the kitchen, that has hard flooring.

Disinfecting

There are multiple bathroom cleaning solutions you can use when disinfecting your bathroom floors.

Mops

Mops are a classic choice for floor cleaning. If you’re going to use a mop, you’ll want a cleaning solution with antibacterial cleaner in it. The standard way to create this is with a cleaning concentrate, such as what’s offered by Lysol. Simply fill a bucket with a couple gallons of hot water and mix in the necessary amount of cleaning solution. Check individual cleaner labels for the correct amount.

Wet your mop, after sweeping, and mop every part of the floor. Every time you rinse the mop in the bucket, wring it out with your hands or any built on wringer.Ensure, when mopping, that you don’t oversaturate the floor.  Getting the floor very wet will make it take longer to dry and can damage certain types of flooring, such as vinyl tiles, which can lose their adhesion. Then, leave your floor to dry. Once the floor has dried, it is best practice to go over it once more. This will ensure no part of the floor is accidentally neglected.

Because mops aren’t washable in the same way other solutions are, you’ll want to let your mop dry thoroughly and then keep it somewhere with hard floor, like the laundry room. It is also recommended, like the broom, not to use the bathroom mop in the kitchen, unless you want to spread fecal particles on the kitchen floor.

Swiffer Mops

If you prefer to use a Swiffer, or an off-brand version of a Swiffer mop, ensure you use some kind of cleaning solution. A dry Swiffer will not sanitize your floors. Swiffer Wet Jets include a cleaning fluid, and some Swiffer Mops come with wet wipe attachments. The most important part of using a Swiffer for your bathroom is throwing away the wipe attachment when you’re done. Do not use the same wipe in other rooms after using it in the bathroom.

Manual Washing

Alternatively, if you plan to change your clothes and shower after cleaning the bathroom, you can scrub the floor manually. You can use the same kind of solution you would for a mop. When scrubbing the floors manually, it is always recommended to use a cloth or towel rather than a sponge or brush. A cloth or towel is more effective and can be washed in a washing machine to purge it of bacteria and fecal particulates.

Ingenious Bathroom Cleaning Solutions: The Toilet

If you’re tired of struggling to clean a dirty toilet, and just find it plain unpleasant, this is for you. Part of being plumbers is knowing the ins and outs of bathroom fixtures, including cleaning them. So, if you’re in need of some bathroom cleaning solutions, you’ve come to the right place.

Rubber Gloves

The first thing we want to stress to our readers is the value of using disposable gloves. For many, a large part of what makes toilet cleaning unpleasant is the tightrope of wiping down in corners without getting something gross on your hands. If you’re squeamish about waste, get a box of disposable gloves. They’re easy to store under the sink and you can throw them away when you’re done using them.

Eco Friendly Bathroom Cleaning Solutions

Even better is getting rubber gloves you can reuse. Thicker, more durable rubber gloves can be bought in most stores with cleaning supplies. When you’re done with them, simply wash your hands thoroughly with antibacterial soap while still wearing them. Then, when you take them off, ensure they’re right side out and let them dry by the sink before storing them for the next cleaning session.

Soaking Cleaner

For the toilet bowl, instead of scrubbing until your arm is aching, get yourself a soaking toilet bowl cleaner. These usually come in a blue color, in bottles shaped to reach under the toilet rim. You simply untwist the top, flip it upside down, and squeeze lightly while rotating it under the edge of the toilet. The cleaner then runs from just under the rim, all the way down each side of the toilet bowl.

If you make this one of your first steps in the bathroom cleaning process, perhaps right after turning the water on to soak the bathtub, the grime in the toilet will be much more willing to come off by the time you begin scrubbing it. Plus, these cleaners don’t just make grime easier to remove, they sanitize the bowl.

Ditch the Wet Wipes

For the exterior of the toilet, many people use antibacterial wet wipes, such as those from Lysol. While these aren’t inherently bad for cleaning, they are not the easiest method. Here’s why:

  1. With no time to soak in anything, anything dried onto the outside of your toilet will require scrubbing. Wet wipes are not very thick or chemically powerful, which makes them mediocre, at best, when it comes to scrubbing.
  2. Because wet wipes are so damp, they’re hard to pick things up with. If you tend to get hair collecting on your toilet and you use wet wipes, you know what I mean. Trying to wipe up hairs ends up just moving them around. They don’t really like to stick to the wipes.
  3. Wet wipes are not biodegradable, which means more waste.

Foaming Spray

In terms of better bathroom cleaning solutions for the exterior of the toilet, using a foaming spray with paper towels is peak among them. Foaming sprays can be sprayed on at the start of your cleaning session and left to sit. They will loosen grime and sanitize the surface of the toilet. 

Once your foaming spray has had time to sit, use paper towels to wipe the toilet clean. Paper towels, because they’re dry and have a different texture than wipes, are better at picking up particulates. Things like hairs stick to paper towels better. Plus, they’re biodegradable, so throwing them out is guilt free.