A rub-a-scrub-scrubb
I'll let you in on a little secret, bleach... It's been around for ages and reminds me of old grannies and clean toilets, but now, at least in my world, it has a new lease on life.
The UK weather has a certain reputation, although not wholly true (it rains more in Syndey and San Francisco than in London), but it does mean that the place is more suceptible to mould and mildew than, say, Phenoix or the Gobi Desert.
One of the main results is mouldy bathrooms and shower curtains. Now our shower curtain isn't the Rolls Royce's of shower curtains with mildew resistance, but it does the job and keeps us from flooding the bathroom. Over time it got a bit tired and seemed to be on its last legs. Being a frugle German, I first tried to wash it in the washing machine (worked great for dirty runny shoes...), but this didn't even remotely do the job. Frustrate, but not downtrodden, I got the bright idea of soaking it in a bucket of water with bleach. What else did I have to loose?
Before I go on and you think I am crazy, if you buy a decent shower curtain in this country, it will put you back up to £30 ($50). I don't know about you, but I have better things to spend that kind of money on and am willing to waste £0.30 of bleach and a pretty much ruined shower curtain trying.
Here the science bit, I used 20ml of lemon scented thick bleach per 5 litres of water in a bucket and soaked the shower curtain for 6 hours. All of the, what appeared to be, permenant mildew and lime scale stains were gone and I had a clean as new shower curtain.
I then proceeded to bleach some old towels and this did get them whiter than white, but left them quite hard and scratchy. I think they would need a bit of fabric softner and a dryer (very rare for apartment dwelling Londoners) to get them back to normal. Believe me, scratchy towels may be great for all-over-body exfoliation, but let's leave that to the experts.
The moral of the story is just beacuse it looks dead, doesn't mean it is dead. Try a bit of bleach and see if it comes back to life...
Comments
I got "hard and scratchy" towels once after using them to mop up water from a bathroom floor (can anyone say bathtub flooding?).
The floor had just been cleaned with some strong chemicals and the towels have never been the same again.
No amount of rinsing with softener helped... we don't have a dryer either though.
Posted by: David Kaspar | June 2, 2006 11:52 AM
why use a bucket? as you take the shower curtain off it's hooks, just let it fall into the tub which you have filled with your bleach solution. While you are at it, leave the rubber non-slip mat in the tub as well. Now the same solution is cleaning the tub, shower curtain and the tub mat all at once.
use a long handled brush (a toilet brush works, but I'd have a seperate one for this job) to brush the same bleachy water up onto the tile grout to de-mold it as well.
(be careful not to over bleach clothing and towels, they may look super clean now, but in another wash or two they will be threadbare and useless.)
Posted by: nilzed | April 27, 2008 11:07 PM