Of all the spots in the house, the southeast corner of the upstairs bathroom makes me the most anxious. It's the corner of the bathroom with the toilet, and that bathroom was always the eyesore of the house. While we laid in bed and looked over the Zillow ad for the first time, J remarked to me that "it isn't a good sign that there are no pictures of the bathroom." We've made some progress with it. We put in a nice threshold (there wasn't one), replaced the door handle that didn't lock, put in a recycled tile floor, and even repainted the tub. The tub repainting hasn't stuck though, (the bottom coat always peels away after a few weeks) and the grout got so dirty in the great Leaking Kitchen Ceiling fiasco of 2015.
It was during the Leaking Kitchen Ceiling fiasco that the southeast corner of the bathroom went from bad to dreadful. We'd made a mess of the baseboard and wainscot while putting the floor in earlier that summer, and then when the kitchen ceiling started leaking we made several vain attempts to figure out what was wrong with the leak. To make a very long and painful story short, a bad contractor from Craigslist spent an hour drilling into the cast iron pipe underneath our toilet and spattering flecks of sickly brown effluvium all over the new floor and the already dirty baseboard.
I feel anxious whenever I look into that corner because it reminds me that I haven't figured out a way to clean it up. Should I repaint? Do I just need to get down on my hands and knees and give it a really thorough scrubbing? Should I use some sort of multipurpose bathroom cleaner, or just a bucket of hot water and soap? Every few months I'll try to do just that and then get frustrated when it doesn't look any better, aside from having taken up the layer of dust and bathroom tissue shards that accumulated behind the toilet.
Nobody wants to clean behind the toilet. That's the real thing. I'd rather read. Or practice. Or anything else. I look at the stained/peeling/dusty paint and have this uneasy feeling that our grandparents would have kept their bathrooms spotless with once a week cleanings, even after mucking out the stables and making homemade applesauce and fighting in a World War earlier in the day. I'm a defective adult for not being able to look after my own living space. I must have missed this bit in home economics. I know that I took that course in high school, but I can only remember the bit about how to write a check and how store brands are indistinguishable from name brand cereals.
So I stand, with children of my own howling about my knees, unready for the task of giving them a sanitary bathroom. I end up dumping them in the bath. Felix fell off the toilet earlier while I was trying to floss and he was trying to be in my lap. Owen is upset because he fell off the stairs and because he doesn't understand that everyone else in the family has different standards of personal space. James is hiding somewhere, probably trying to avoid Owen. Felix and Owen are happy to be in the bath at first, but then Owen remembers that he needs to go to the bathroom RIGHT NOW so I put him (dripping all over the floor) onto the toilet seat. This is good, because I still don't know whether I should be using hot water and soap or some kind of cleaner, and now I have both all over the place.
I pull on my elbow length rubber gloves and start scrubbing away at the baseboard and the floor. Bits of dried grout that I didn't clean up properly from when I regrouted last summer get scraped off. I pick at stubborn patches of stained paint with a razor and it comes off a bit. I wipe off with paper towels and move onto the next spot, one tile at a time, careful to get up everything that I can possibly scrape off.
Eventually Owen and Felix lose patience for playing in the tub. Felix is crying because Owen is splashing him in the face on purpose. I douse Owen with a cup of water, but it doesn't deter him. He's just happy someone is paying attention to him.
I finish wiping the floor down and stand up to survey my work. It doesn't really look any better. The floor is shining, but you can still see the stains on the baseboard and the wainscot. I didn't even get around to the baseboard on the west side of the bathroom (which is in much better shape, but dustier, since the shelving we have there is screwed into the wall) because the kids pooped out too soon. After I get them out and dressed I take the plunger, the toilet brush, and the trash can down to the utility sink.
Again, do real grown ups actually clean these things? I guess they must. We've never even taken the plastic cover off of the toilet brush stand, and you can see that there's grime inside the plastic. I rinse them all and then scrub them with disinfectant. Some of the gunk inside the plastic trash bin is stubborn, and it's the same color as the gunk from the wall. Probably residue from the clean up of the Craigslist guy.
Next time I'll finish the bathroom and go into the bedroom. The knees of my jeans are soaked (from kneeling on the towel that I used to clean up after Owen's bathroom timeout) and my hands are all dried out. But I'm glad I tried, even though I didn't get anywhere. I suspect that someone who knows what they're doing would have been intensely frustrated if they'd watched me, kind of like how I feel watching James muddle through cleaning up his room without really paying attention to what he's doing. But there are stories to be told along the whole length of the baseboard, from that awful, anxious spot in the bathroom through the dusty stretches behind our bedroom furniture, even out to the leftover bits that I found in our basement and re-purposed into an ugly looking garden square. (Caring for a garden was another bit that I must have missed in home economics.) I'm going to keep writing about cleaning it all up. It's one of those child's-eye level parts of a house that holds a thousand unspoken stories in it. (I can still remember where the snag is in the bit of baseboard next to the heating vent in my parent's house where I'd lie down behind the couch on winter mornings, or squeeze in next to a brother who'd woken up before I did.) Maybe, just maybe, one of the stories that my kids will think of when they go into their child's-eye view of our bathroom is "that's the part that used to be really dirty before Daddy cleaned it up."
I just have no idea how, yet.
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