January Cure- Assignment 19

Ugh.  I won't even sugar coat it.  Assignment 19- cleaning the bathroom- is not the feel good last weekend assignment I would have hoped for.  Even though it's there every year, I always wish it were earlier.  Next year I may rearrange it so that I do the bedroom last.  (Because we all know how much I love a clean bedroom.)

The only consolation is I still get flowers.  And I have to say, Trader Joe's has the best flowers.  Inexpensive and they last.  Whenever I get fresh flowers I always put a new diagonal cut on the stem and make sure that no leaves are in the water.  Then every couple days I replace the water and wipe down the stems of any slime or other ick.  (Slime and ick are the scientific terms, and I have no clue how much it actually helps but I think it works for me.)

So continuing on the theme of slime and ick, I cleaned the bathroom.  It wasn't *that* bad, but still, it's a bathroom.  It was an hour of scrubbing, wiping and mopping.  I even tried the Pinterest hack I saw to put a couple drops of essential oil in the toilet paper roll.  It said that it would fill the room with a yummy scent every time the roll is used.  It doesn't seem to work though so I'm planning on buying a reed diffuser instead.

This bathroom gets great light!

The picture above is how the bathroom looked when we first moved in.  Totally livable but definitely needs work that you can't quite see.  The tiles are chipped and cracked but even worse is the grout.  My guess is it wasn't cleaned or sealed for years and instead of buckling down and scrubbing, someone put a thin layer of new grout over top.  While it may look good for a while, that's not how it works.  New grout won't hold onto old grout and without it getting deep between the tiles, there's nothing keeping it in place.  So the more I clean it, the more it comes up, leaving me with dark patches I can't clean and new patches that I can.

Eventually, we plan on tearing it up and putting in a heated floor with new tiles.  This bathroom is really cold so that day can't come fast enough! 

In the meantime we're fixing it up little by little.  The glass door for the shower is proving to be a pain.  It had water spots from before we moved in that I still can't remove and it doesn't do the best job at keeping water in the shower.  So until we totally re-do the bathroom (which might be this year) we bought a shower curtain.  Now the water stays in the shower and it's really warm! Score!