How to: Get a bathtub/shower sparkly clean with FlyLady-ishness

I took these pictures in our upstairs bathroom this morning, the one the girls and I share. My husband, offended by the number of bath poufies and floral-scented body washes (see the top picture, haha), decamped to the downstairs bathroom three years ago, unfortunately just after I'd spent my birthday money re-decorating it in a pink-and-cream color scheme, featuring roses and camillas, right down to the switchplate and the soap dispenser. He suffers, and not always in stoic silence.

Anyway, the bottom picture is an illustration of what I use to clean my bathtub/shower combo on a daily basis, based on FlyLady Marla Cilley's methods of doing a little bit here and a little bit there, to save yourself having to do a GREAT BIG HUGE AMOUNT two hours before your weekend company is due.

I will be the first to admit that our tub/shower combo isn't the best. We have an enameled cast-iron bathtub that is ordinary white. The outdated tile that used to line the three sides was removed by the former owner and replaced with a three-piece surround. It's pebbly-textured and probably just made of some kind of plastic, rather than the nicer fiberglass. The fixtures are okay, although I'd like to replace them, but the nicest feature is our really awesome hand shower, which hangs on a bracket over our heads until we wish to remove it. The biggest shower problem we have is our lack of soft water, which has stained the bathtub and fixture-wall of the shower with faint rusty stains that have proved to be impossible to remove. I know this. I've tried.

The faint pinkish stains just really bother me, but since it's obvious they're not coming off, I've decided that the next best thing is that the rest of the tub is going to gleam with shiny cleanliness.

Hence, the FlyLady method. My main tub cleaner is regular ol' shampoo. Yep. Shampoo. The purpose of shampoo is to remove two things from your hair: dirt and oil. It follows logically that shampoo, then, can remove those two things from your bathtub, and the best thing is that you can use it while you're in the shower without having to worry about gassing yourself to death with toxic fumes.

On the dresser there, you can see the White Rain shampoo I bought for one small buck at the Dollar Tree. I use the pink sponge with a little shampoo squirted on it and scrub the three shower walls on Wednesdays and do the same thing to the tub on Thursdays. I wipe down the two shelves that hold all of our beeyooooteee products on Fridays, see above photo with props to Victoria's Secret and Arbonne. I do all of this lickety-split while I'm taking my morning shower.

Once out of the shower, I spritz the walls and tub off with the Clean Shower on a daily basis. Which I am convinced this stuff is part cleanser and part magic potion devised by Professors Slughorn and Dumbledore. I've never seen anything like it for not allowing soap buildup to stick. It also keeps the fixtures shiny-bright, and it smells fresh and good, not all yuckily chemical-fragranced.

I spritz the mat -- which I wash with the towels twice a month -- with the Lysol disinfectant, also daily. Everyone knows to rinse that mat off with the hand shower before they get in there and stand on it. I buy a really nice mildew resistant tub mat (meaning "$8.99 at Bed, Bath and Beyond") a couple of times a year and ALWAYS in the clear color: If some kind of mold starts growing on that thing despite my best efforts, I want to know, like, right away.

So! That is my cleaning trifecta-plus-sponge that keeps the tub looking really nice. I love FlyLady's method for cleaning the tub, sink and toilets every day with a swish and a whisk. Our bathrooms are always company-ready even in the middle of a long, dull winter week.