If you're focusing on what to get rid of when organizing your
home, you're doing it wrong. For example, when decluttering
and organizing a bathroom drawer, pull out only the items
you want to keep or donate, and then scoop up or dump the rest
of the drawer into the trash. Next you need a way to store
like items together. You could purchase a sectioned
acrylic drawer organizer, but even a dollar store plastic
utensil organizer would work great for storing items like
Q-tips, makeup, tweezers, etcetera.
Welcome back to Clean With Me, the podcast where I talk you
through cleaning your house step by step.
In today's episode, I'm going to talk you through cleaning, even
a large bathroom, and I'm also going to give you some
decluttering and organizing ideas to think about while you
work. But before we dive into cleaning
the bathroom, I encourage you to get presentable for the day, or
start a load of laundry, or get your house smelling fresh, which
could include taking out the trash while you're doing
Whichever of those tasks is most important to you.
Today I want to talk about decluttering versus organizing.
OK, decluttering focuses on getting rid of stuff, but too
many people stop there. You may have gotten rid of a lot
of stuff recently, but if you're still disorganized, you're going
to have a hard time cleaning up after yourself as you go about
your day. To fix this, you need to store
like items together in logical homes based on where they're
actually used. By grouping similar items all
your skin care in one drawer container, all your hair care
accessories in another, you create a mental map of your
space, and when every item has a specific logical place where it
goes, putting things away stops being a chore and becomes a
mindless reflex. You won't even think of it as
cleaning as you go anymore because you're just returning
things to their designated spots.
It's just like when you visit someone and you ask them where
something goes. If you're helping them clean up.
Well, it's your house. You determine where things go.
So don't fall into the trap of just putting it anywhere because
it's your house. You've got to define where
things go. OK, we'll talk about storage a
little bit later. I'm going to give you about
another minute to gear up for your cleaning session.
If you haven't already done so, it's time to gather up your
cleaning supplies for cleaning the bathroom.
For example, you might need a toilet cleaning brush.
We keep ours by the toilet in a little container next to one of
our toilets, but then we carry it to the other bathroom.
I used to have one in each bathroom.
Right now I just have one. So maybe you need to bring that
to the bathroom. Maybe you need some rags, paper
towels, disinfecting wipes, pre moistened mop pads.
If you're using a Swiffer, microfiber clothes or even paper
towels for the mirrors. Microfiber clothes are a little
bit preferable, I guess, and that's what I used.
But I did grow up using paper towels to clean the bathroom
mirrors. It works, you know, a few little
balls of lint never hurt anyone. OK, just use what you have on
hand. You know, maybe you don't know
where your micro fiber clothes are.
You don't have any clean, but you have napkins or paper
towels. Use what you have.
In a pinch, you can even use an old T-shirt to clean a mirror.
OK, let's gather up whatever products you use as well.
OK? Maybe you have a bathroom
cleaning spray, Maybe you use soft scrub, scrubbing bubbles,
some kind of Clr. In fact, I used a Clr recently.
That's the bathroom shine one I think it's called.
Maybe I'll mention that in the description.
It's not sponsored or anything, but I have extremely hard water.
It was affecting the tile, making our tile look kind of
cloudy in the showers. And so we recently tried that
Clr and that got rid of that cloudiness on our tile.
OK. For cleaning toilets, I either
use a bleach powder like Comet or Ajax or a dedicated toilet
bowl cleaner, which is always nice because you can squirt that
toilet bowl cleaner. Disinfecting wipes are, of
course, nice for cleaning the toilet because you can, you
know, throw them away as you go. OK.
But anyway, whatever products you use, you're going to need
some kind of glass cleaner or a glass and surface spray,
obviously for the mirrors, shower doors and whatnot.
Let's get all those products gathered up to the bathroom and
then when you get there, it's time to get some something into
the toilet bowl so that you can allow that product to do its
work. OK?
Whether you're sprinkling some Comet or Ajax and kind of
scrubbing the bowl real quick to coat that toilet bowl with the
product or squirting a toilet bowl cleaner up under the rim
and then it kind of runs down and coats the toilet bowl.
I like to give it a little scrub, though, to kind of, you
know, get some friction involved.
And then we're going to let that sit while we focus on other
parts of the bathroom. OK, now.
And it doesn't take long at all. Once you get that done, the next
thing you're going to do is start your pre clean.
And this session is designed to clean even a large bathroom.
OK, it's based on a couple days ago when I cleaned my master
bathroom, which has dual sinks, a lot of counter space and a
separate bathtub and shower. And then of course, a little
room with the toilet. So it's a bigger bathroom than
my other bathroom. And I'm also going to talk about
organizing those drawers, though you probably won't have time to
do that during the session. I do want to inspire you to
organize any bathroom drawers, cabinets, or shelves you may
have. But I realized some bathrooms
don't have much storage at all. We'll talk about it, but for
now, I want you to do that pre clean.
And what do I mean by a pre clean?
I'm talking about removing any bath mats or rugs out of the
bathroom. I'm talking about clearing off
the vanity area. There are things on the vanity
that don't belong, probably, but also things that do.
We're going to move all of it. We're going to relocate any
items to where they go, but we're going to set aside even
things that go on the countertop like the toothbrush holder and
soap dispenser and maybe a little plant or decoration of
some sort. Whatever you keep there
perpetually still needs to move aside somewhere so that we can,
you know, kind of go spray happy and clean that area.
Sometimes with a large master bathroom that nobody really sees
besides you and your spouse, there could be a tendency to
leave a towel or clothes or shoes on the floor.
No judgement here. Let's pick that all up or any
other random items that might be on your bathroom floor.
I want you to get that bathroom floor sweep and mop ready
because once we've cleaned the vanity area, the toilet, the tub
and shower, it's going to be time to sweep and mop your way
out of the bathroom. So we want to make sure that
that floor is completely picked up as part of the pre cleaning
process. OK.
And of course I'll give you a few minutes to do that.
Sometimes the pre clean can take a while and it might be why
you've been procrastinating on cleaning that large bathroom.
There's a tendency to just plot things down while you're doing
the pre clean. I'll I'll talk about my bathroom
drawers. In my large bathroom, I have 8
drawers and two cabinets. Yes, that's a lot of storage
space. It's wonderful.
But I recently cleaned out those bathroom drawers, basically kind
of redefining what goes in each drawer and storing like items
together. For example, there's a drawer
for hair accessories like claw clips, hair ties, scrunchies,
barrettes, Bobby pins. And I actually had a lot more of
more of those items than I thought because they'd gotten
kind of scattered. In fact, what kind of prompted
me to organize my bathroom drawers recently as I was
cleaning my bedroom and there's a ledge on the back of my
headboard. And I had a bunch of claw clips
and various sizes and scrunchies and earrings just lined up on
the back of my headboard because I have a tendency to take those
uncomfortable items when I crawl into bed.
I I accidentally go to bed with earrings and a clock lip and a
hair tie and then I take them out and they had started to
accumulate. So when I went to put them in
the bathroom drawer, I kind of wanted to see how many of those
items I had and realized that there were clock lips and hair
ties in like 3 or 4 different drawers, even though there was a
drawer that they were supposed to go in.
But over time, you know, it's one of the laws of
thermodynamics, things become just more disorganized over
time. I'm paraphrasing a little bit
here, but you know what I'm talking about.
So I decided it was time after a bedroom cleaning session to
organize those drawers. I did not combine it with a
bathroom cleaning session. It's a big bathroom.
And I'll admit cleaning that bathroom is kind of a lot of
work when you're including the the shower and the tub and the
floor, it can take a while. And if you've been listening to
my show for a while, you know, I like to break tasks into
manageable parts. And so organizing the drawers
could be a different step from cleaning your bathroom.
However, if if you're quick, you might be able to combine it into
this bathroom session. But either way, I want to
encourage you to organize the storage spaces in your bathroom,
whether you store things in drawers, a cabinet under the
sink, because even our small bathroom that has a fake drawer
has a cabinet under the sink. And the way we organize that
cabinet is by having little plastic bends and I think a
couple shoe boxes basically for different people's toiletries.
They go in those containers and that's how we keep it organized
under the sink. And of course, we do keep a
couple things on top of that vanity area.
There's a little decorative bowl with small items in it, you
know, where my daughter can put her earrings and things like
that. There's a toothbrush holder, you
know, the typical stuff, but a lot of it gets stored in that
cabinet. So I definitely recommend having
individual containers if you're storing things in those
cabinets. For the drawers, I recommend
having, you know, like I mentioned earlier, either drawer
divider system of some sort or a, a cheap plastic, you know,
container that's designed for like a small silverware drawer
that one might use in the kitchen.
I have a larger wooden silverware organizer in my
kitchen because my drawer is large.
But at a previous house I had a smaller silverware drawer with a
little plastic organizer. Well, that plastic organizer is
now the organizer of my makeup drawer, which is basically one
of the top drawers that I keep just my everyday items in.
Everyday makeup items, my favorite brush, my deodorant,
and so on. So those make great drawer
organizers, but when you're only storage is a cupboard, you might
just use little bins. Another way to store makeup,
which I do have this in one of my master bathroom cupboards, is
a little acrylic turntable. It's kind of like a Lazy Susan
that's got a cylinder container in the middle and then some
little containers around it. It's the type of thing you could
use to store makeup brushes and long skinny makeup items.
So that fits nicely in a cupboard and then you could pull
that out and put it up on the counter.
Perfect for a bathroom where you don't have drawers.
If you do have drawers, you need to define the purpose of the
drawers so they don't all become catch alls.
Hopefully by now you've completed the pre cleaning step.
Now it's time for you to clean the sinks, the countertops,
obviously the faucet hardware and the mirrors.
OK, You know which products you use, but I typically use a
bleach powder to clean the sinks and then for the countertop
mirror and hardware, OK, I use a glass cleaner.
I attach a micro fiber cloth to the end of my Swiffer Swiffer
mop. You know how it's designed where
you can wrap it with that pre moistened cloth.
If you're familiar with those types of mops, you instead of
the pre moistened pad, you can put the micro fiber cloth on
there and then spray your mirror with your favorite glass cleaner
and mop the mirror. It's just so much easier to get
a street free shine that way. But regardless of whether you're
using a mop or just wiping a mirror by hand, you want to keep
wiping after you see the product is gone, keep on wiping.
That's how you get rid of the streaks.
You know what I mean? You get it wet with the spray,
you wipe it, but then you keep on wiping a little longer than
you think you should. And that works great.
But I love doing it with the mop.
But anyway, because my countertops are a shiny tile, I
like to use the glass cleaner on that whole vanity area.
You know, excluding the sink. Like I mentioned, I use like
bleach powder to whiten the inside of the sink.
But once I rinse that out and I'm done with that, I'm ready to
use a glass cleaner on the mirror, the sink hardware and
the vanity, the actual tile countertop in the bathroom.
You might use different products from having different surfaces
and a different size bathroom, but that that's the way I do it
in my large bathroom. So bonus tasks could be dusting
light fixtures, wiping down switch plates, outlet covers,
maybe your door frames, door handles, you know, look around
and see what needs to be done as far as your upper surfaces.
But you're going to be focusing on the vanity area over the next
few minutes. While you while you're doing
that, I'll talk a little bit about drawer organization.
This part's just kind of inspirational because I I want
you to do the heavy cleaning first before you worry about
organizing that. And that might even happen on
another day when you're cleaning your bedroom.
Sometimes organizing or cleaning a master bathroom combines well
with cleaning the master bedroom because it's kind of all in the
same room. You know, you shut yourself in
there. You put on a podcast or some
music. You go to town cleaning your
master bedroom and bathroom. But this episode is just about
the bathroom. I tend to make longer episodes
for my financial subscribers that have you cleaning more than
one area. In fact, right now I'm working
on a series crawling out of the hole.
I've already done crawling out of the whole day 1-2 and three.
There's going to be like 3 more days of it coming up, so now is
a great time to subscribe to bonus content for a small
monthly fee. If you're listening on Apple or
Spotify, the subscription is probably already being
advertised to you. Another way to access those
episodes is through a Patreon subscription.
Special special thanks to those who are already supporting the
show. I appreciate you more than you,
you know, hopefully you're cleaning the vanity area.
If you get done before I switch you to the next task, turn your
attention to the toilet. OK, because we haven't started
on the exterior parts of the toilet yet and then re scrubbed
the bowl after having, you know, after it had time to soak.
But just some examples. If you have drawers, how you
would define them, maybe there's a drawer where you keep your
electric hair Clipper and the attachments.
You know, maybe if your husband cuts his own hair, cuts your
son's hair with those Clippers, you might have a drawer for
that. OK, we do.
We have a Clipper drawer. Another example I mentioned is a
makeup drawer. Another example is a drawer for
the nail stuff, your nail Polish removers, the little things that
separate your toes, the polishes.
You might have a drawer for that.
You might have more than one drawer for that.
If doing nails is a hobby for you, everybody's organization
system is going to be a little bit different.
In my nail drawer, I have a little organ, a little metal
organization tray from the office department.
It's good to have little trays. I mentioned the hair ties and
claw clips. I put a little cardboard box in
the drawer for those for now, you know, because I, I just
wanted to get them all together. I think having them in a box in
one of the drawers kind of reminds me that they have a
specific place where they go, so I don't just shove them in any
old drawer. Something interesting that I
noticed when cleaning out the drawers and, you know, making
sure that like items were stored together in their respective
drawers, is that I had pens and pencils in almost every drawer.
It sounds weird, but over time I'd absent mindedly set a pencil
or pen on the vanity area. Then when I went to clean the
bathroom, I just kind of put everything into the drawers to
quickly clear that off, when what I should have been doing is
taking the pens and pencils just a few feet behind me to my night
stand. Not behind me where I am sitting
right now, if you're watching the video, but my night stand is
only a few steps away from my bathroom because it's in my
bedroom. I could have easily put the pens
and pencils in the little pencil cup that's on my night stand.
I just didn't really think about it.
But now that I've just reorganized my bathroom drawers.
Going forward, I'm planning to keep my pens and pencils in that
cup when I find that they've been left on the vanity, because
there's no situation where I would need to have a pen or a
pencil, you know, in the drawer or the bathroom.
I can walk over to the night stand if I'm on a phone call,
standing at the vanity, curling my hair and need to write
something down, for example. You don't want to store the same
kind of items in too many different places in your home.
You just don't. Now, pens and pencils you do use
in more than one place. I have that pencil cup on my
night stand. I often write things down when
I'm lying in bed. And then if you're watching the
video version, I'm holding up a cute little Hello Kitty pen and
pencil jar. And that's what that clicking
noise is for those who are listening to audio only.
That's on my desk in my office. And then of course, the junk
drawer in the kitchen is a good community location for pens and
pencils. Like if the kids want to grab a
pen or pencil, I'm going to have them go to the junk car.
Obviously they have a lot in their bedrooms and in their
backpacks and so on. In fact, I was pleased at how
many mechanical pencils I found in random bathroom drawers.
I'm not proud of this, but I'm pleased about it because my kids
are always asking me to buy those, and I'm able to replenish
their supply for free now because I found a bunch of them.
OK, for some reason, my kids prefer mechanical pencils.
I think a lot of kids do nowadays.
Maybe they don't like having to sharpen their pencils.
My husband and I were just talking about how we like the
wooden pencils. They're just dirtier, they're
cheaper, and we're kind of heavy-handed when we write, so
we're likely to break the leads on the mechanical pencils.
I think I do get my kids at least a .7 lead.
You don't want to go any skinnier than that with the
lead. But some of us like those old
school pencils. OK, Hopefully you've cleaned
your vanity area. It doesn't take that long once
you clear everything off, even in a large bathroom.
And I used to feel like it was kind of daunting when I was
cleaning the mirror by hand. I'd have to kind of stand up on
something to reach the top of the mirror or at least stretch.
But with the mopping method it's super fast and often after I
spray and mop that mirror I turn my attention to the shower and
do the same inside and out. For the shower doors and even my
shower walls, I clean the bottom of the shower a different way.
That tends to get more soap scum and grime and needs a good
scrubbing. But we have the same shiny tile
in our as our for our shower walls as we do on the vanities
and in our kitchen. And glass cleaner or the pre
moistened Swiffer pads work well on that type of tile I've found.
But like I mentioned, when I started to get a cloudy build
up, I did need to use that special Clr bathroom product
that's designed to shine your bathroom.
So a lot of you have asked for product recommendations and
that's something that I've discovered that I really like.
So hopefully by now you've wiped down your vanity, you've cleaned
the sinks, faucets and mirror. Let's turn our attention to the
toilet. Maybe you want to give that
toilet bowl another scrub, but then it's time to clean the
exterior parts of the toilet and obviously you don't want to
cross contaminate. I'm really big on using either
disposable disinfecting wipes or paper towels and some kind of
disinfectant spray. That way I'm throwing something
away after each step. There's more than one way to do
it, but I like to use something disposable.
One thing I still have not tried are those disposable toilet bowl
cleaners where there's like an end of it, like the stick thing
and then there's the thing that releases off the end of it.
I was thinking about trying it the other day but I didn't see
them in my Walmart. I don't know if they were out of
them or if they don't carry them, but I use just a regular
toilet brush and then in the little container that I set it
in, I usually fill that with some kind of cleaning liquid so
that that toilet brush is being sanitized in the liquid it's
soaking in, if that makes sense. More often than not, I'm using
disinfecting wipes. I clean the toilet seat behind
the seat, the rim everywhere basically.
And I, I start at the top and kind of work my way down.
You know, I use a different wipe for the top of the tank and the
flusher handle. Then I use for like the rim and
the seat. You know, I do the seat before I
do the rim. You know, you want to do it like
the, you want to start with the less, the least gross items
like, and then the grosser part, which is like the back of the
seat in the rim. You want to clean that after
you've wiped down the seat. If you're using the same wipe or
the same paper towel, that's how I do it anyway.
But once you've cleaned that, the toilet seat behind the seat,
the rim around the hinges and everything, and you know, of
course, the toilet tank, flush your handle, the harder part is
the exterior part of the bowl. That's where you've got to
really get down low, whether you're sitting on your behind or
on your knees and just really get in there.
And it's not very comfortable on my bathroom tile to get down on
my knees and clean down there. Sometimes I put a folded towel
on the bathroom floor if I'm going to get down on my knees,
just to kind of pad it a little bit.
That can make it a lot more comfortable.
But you, you've got to get in there and clean the exterior
part of the toilet bowl down where those bolt covers are and
the floor around it. You know, while you're down
there, of course you want to you want when you get to the bottom
of the toilet base, you want to clean the floor around it.
You want to clean behind it, the baseboard, all those areas that
are going to be kind of difficult to get to with your
mop. Take care of those by hand since
you're already down there on your knees around the porcelain
throne. OK, All right, I'm running out
of time. So hopefully you got that toilet
clean. The next thing I want you to do
is clean either your bathtub or your shower or both.
If you're quick, OK, you want to get that tub basin wet and
sprinkle something in there or spray something in there,
whatever cleaner you like, and clean out that tub.
I like to use a scrub brush on a long handle, a little shower
scrubbing tool so that I don't have to bend too much if that
makes it super quick. I also like to have a large
pitcher or maybe a plastic 32 ounce cup to kind of help me
rinse the sides of the tub after I clean.
When you've got the cup or pitcher right there and the
tool, it's super fast to clean your tub and maybe you have a
ledge around it. If it's a large garden tub that
you need to wipe down, sometimes I wipe that down by hand with
the with just a pre moistened mop ad that's designed for the
Swiffer. I just wipe that ledge, the tile
ledge off with that OK. And then once I've cleaned out
the tub and I know I can talk faster than you clean, can
clean, you might be just doing one or the other.
I, I head to the shower floor and I, you know, I turn on the
shower, get that wet, sprinkle my comment or Ajax or whatever,
grab that tool again, scrub that bathroom or that shower floor
real good. It's so much easier with the
tool than doing it by hand. You know, when you've got the
leverage, you don't have to bend as much, It's super fast.
You know, cleaning a shower can seem daunting, but it really
isn't. If the shower you're working on
right now has a shower curtain, I recommend opening the curtain
and then spraying the inside of it, the part that gets wet,
spraying it with some kind of a daily shower spray or even just
a mixture of bleach and water if you don't mind using bleach.
My mother-in-law used to spray the inside of her shower curtain
with a bleach and water mixture is just something I noticed.
I thought, oh, that's how you do that, you know, to make sure
that it doesn't get any mildew. But there are also products
designed to spray the inside of a shower and you can use that on
the inside of your shower curtain as well.
OK, I'm going to give you a couple more minutes to do that.
And then of course, the last step is sweeping and mopping
your way out of the bathroom. And when I mop a bathroom floor,
I often use like a string mop for my large bathroom anyway
because that allows me to scrub the baseboards and the floor in
one fell swoop after sweeping it.
It's super convenient and for those times when you're not
cleaning behind your toilet by hand, the string mop gets back
there pretty good compared to other types of mops.
You know, I'm just talking about the old school mop with the
white strings on it. And I if you have that spinner
one or whatever it's, it's similar, but any string mop will
do the trick. So when you're finished with
your tub and shower, I'm going to want you to sweep and mop
your way out of the bathroom. And it might be after the
episode because you might still be working on your tub or
shower. And of course, when you're in
the tub or shower, you want to kind of take inventory.
Are there empty shampoo, conditioner or body wash bottles
that need to be tossed? Do you need, do you need to put
some soap in there? Anyway, I'm out of time.
So once you finish your tub and shower, you're going to sweep
your sweep and mop your way out of the bathroom.
And I do want you to consider organizing your drawers under
the cabinets or perhaps some other storage solution in the
near future. You know, maybe you have one of
those shelves that goes over the back of the toilet, or maybe you
have just a separate little unit with drawers in it.
Wherever you store things in the bathroom, you probably have some
expired makeup products or things that just didn't work out
that you need to purge. And remember, decluttering is
kind of about purging, but the way to maintain that state of
non clutteredness, OK, is to organize the stuff you do have
because you're more likely to put things away as you go when
you have defined spaces for everything.
So make sure that your bathroom is organized, not just
decluttered. You want to get rid of stuff,
but you also want to organize all that stuff that you want to
keep. Thank you so much for listening.
I appreciate each and every one of you.
And as always, happy cleaning. I'll talk to you in the next
episode.