We don’t do a lot of non-regular, deep cleaning around here. You know, like the cleaning the inside of the oven kind of cleaning. It doesn’t happen much. For instance, we haven’t once cleaned the oven since we bought it four years ago. You may as well know.
The shower curtain liners have been also clamouring for cleaning for months awhile and they’re harder to ignore than the innards of an oven because they’re visible and I occasionally brush against them (blech). The scum on them was getting too gross, even for me.
The last time this happened, my mother bailed us out. Being an excellent cleaner herself, she shows a remarkable restraint in commenting little on the state of our living quarters. Even more miraculous, she’ll sometimes just quietly clean for us. With the shower curtain liners, she once took them down and put them in the washing machine, and they were good again. This process seemed almost manageable for me to try myself, but unfortunately the curtains tore a bit in a few places during the wash. They were still totally usable (for our relaxed standards) but I didn’t think they’d survive another round in the machine.
Replacing the liners would not be expensive. But I don’t want to buy new ones because it seems kind of wasteful to trash that much plastic or nylon or whatever just because I’ve been too lazy to scrub them down.
Inspiration finally struck. Home with the kids on a hot summer day, I removed the dirty liner from the rod and lay it on the grass in the backyard. Mixed up a batch of natural cleaner made of baking soda and vinegar, got some sponges, and set the boys on it.
Like so many things, the longer this cleaning job sat undone the bigger it seemed. When I got to it, I had psyched myself up for a difficult task. But the soapy scum came off with hardly any pressure at all even using the gentlest cleanser. It wasn’t bad at all.
The kids would work on it a little without me, but they were much happier when we scoured as a team. I swished along with them well after it was necessary, and almost wished the liner had been harder to clean to have gotten a little more mileage from the activity…
It took us another 24 hours to bring the curtain inside and hang it back up on the rod again. Also, a careful reader may have noted that I referred to liner in the singular for the actual washing. Because we only did one. The other was left hanging on the rod because it wasn’t as dirty as the other one – I wasn’t prompted into action by being grossed out by it, and that’s the kind of cleaner I am.
Oh well. At least the liners aren’t in the landfill.
