Bathroom Degunk

(Although the title of this blog post sounds a little disgusting, it's not quite as bad as you might think, so please just bear with me.)

Inspired by Sophia's channel My Great Challenge on YouTube, I decided to have a go at tackling some of the gunk that has accummulated around our bath over the past months. Limescale builds up quickly here due to the hardness of the water here in East London.

When I clean the bathroom, one of main areas that always frustrates me is the edge of the bath underneath the shower screen.  Our shower screen hinges so that you can open it out and clean reverse, which as well as preventing you having to step into the bath to clean it properly, also allows easy access to the tap/shower hose area.  It makes life a lot easier, but the down side of this arrangement is that sometimes limescale and gunk accumulates underneath the screen which then requires special attention.

Usually OH has a good go at it with a razor blade and slices it off, but lately he's been preoccupied with work and we didn't have any razor blades, so when I saw it building up again and after being inspired by Sophia's no nonsense approach to DIY tasks, I decided to have a go myself.  Watch Part 1 of her current bathroom makeover here.

I do like watching Sophia's channel. She has done various makeovers in her home, tackling jobs that I would never dream of doing, all by herself. In addition she posts lots of beauty, cleaning, decluttering and organising videos which also inspire me.  I like the way she gets stuck into tasks that I would probably leave to OH.

Anyway, duly inspired I made a point of buying some razor blades from ASDA and headed up to the bathroom. Here's what the bath edge looked like before I started work on it.

It's very embarrassing that I let the limescale build up so badly on the outside of the shower screen/bath edge.  I'm really quite ashamed.  Anyway, after a couple of hours of scraping away with a razor blade, it was a completely different story.  I had to be a little careful that I didn't slice my fingers, but to be honest the blade soon blunted so the edge wasn't so sharp.

Although it still doesn't look completely like new, it is looking much better than it has for quite a while. I did have to remove the disgustingly dirty rubber edge from the shower screen. (It's currently lying in soak in the bath to see if some of the dirt which has found it's way into the middle of the rubber strip will clean up - if not I may have to try to source a new piece or put the old one back on).

Here's what it looked like an hour or so later.

So much better.

Whilst I was at work with the razor blade I decided to use it to resolve a couple of other simple issues that had been annoying me.  One was the scale that had built up around the bath plug hole.

Within seconds it had gone.

Finally, I also used it to remove this little bit of silicone stuck to the side of the downstairs toilet rim.

It had always annoyed me, ever since we moved into the house 8 years ago, because even when I cleaned the toilet, it never looked properly clean with this attached to it.  Why neither of us had bothered to do this before now, I just don't know. Anyhow, now it's been banished for good.

Result.

Thank you Sophia for the motivation to get off my backside and do a proper job of it.

OCD cleaners watch out, I'm coming for your jobs. (As if!)