I remember reading a Maxim magazine when I was around 12 (what? I was a weird kid) and there was an article about things to do before you brought a girl home.
I don't actually remember what the rest of the tips were, but I remember this: Get fluffy white bathroom towels.
The gist was, a girl will judge you on the quality of your bathroom.
For me at least, yeah. Totally true.
Still, the first couple times I hung out with bf at his house, I didn't take a shower. I'm pretty sure that if I had, our relationship might have died right there. I had examined the bathroom and it was.. it was fratboy clean. Which makes zero sense as my bf had never been in a frat. But you know what I mean. It was clean enough but not really clean at all. The mirror had flecks of toothpaste on it, the floor was a weird creepy brown tile with a thick brown grout that never seemed clean, you had to move the bathmat out of the way to shut the door, there were cobwebs on the ceiling. The toilet was.. well it existed. My very hirsute bf left a thin layer of hair on every surface he interacted with, not unlike a golden retriever. The floor was brown. The tiles were brown. The walls were brown. (Brown, you will find out, is a reoccurring theme with my bf. It's not even that he likes the colour brown, he just feels like the best colour to match with brown is more brown. {my bf might actually just be a bear})
I mean, there was PLENTY weird and strange and not right with the rest of the house. But that shower was probably one of the strangest.
To start, there were the weird stains.
They ran from the top of the tub and drizzled down into the basin. They were straight up horrifying.
Not quite brown, and not quite yellow, and also impossible to remove.
I don't actually remember what the rest of the tips were, but I remember this: Get fluffy white bathroom towels.
The gist was, a girl will judge you on the quality of your bathroom.
For me at least, yeah. Totally true.
Still, the first couple times I hung out with bf at his house, I didn't take a shower. I'm pretty sure that if I had, our relationship might have died right there. I had examined the bathroom and it was.. it was fratboy clean. Which makes zero sense as my bf had never been in a frat. But you know what I mean. It was clean enough but not really clean at all. The mirror had flecks of toothpaste on it, the floor was a weird creepy brown tile with a thick brown grout that never seemed clean, you had to move the bathmat out of the way to shut the door, there were cobwebs on the ceiling. The toilet was.. well it existed. My very hirsute bf left a thin layer of hair on every surface he interacted with, not unlike a golden retriever. The floor was brown. The tiles were brown. The walls were brown. (Brown, you will find out, is a reoccurring theme with my bf. It's not even that he likes the colour brown, he just feels like the best colour to match with brown is more brown. {my bf might actually just be a bear})
I mean, there was PLENTY weird and strange and not right with the rest of the house. But that shower was probably one of the strangest.
To start, there were the weird stains.
They ran from the top of the tub and drizzled down into the basin. They were straight up horrifying.
Not quite brown, and not quite yellow, and also impossible to remove.
Of course I tried to clean them. I assumed that my bf was just the worst cleaning person I'd ever met and that he had no idea how to clean a bathtub.
NOTE: I am not actually advocating that you should ever clean up after somebody else. I don't think it's anybody's job to teach somebody else how to be an adult. Really, if you find yourself dating somebody who has not mastered being an adult, it's better to break up with them. People show you who they really are, and you need to believe that. So if you are dating a person who can't clean? They are never ever going to learn. We live in the information age, if they wanted to learn they would have figured it out by now.
It's also a deeply unsettling fact that women are usually expected to carry the emotional burden of being 'the clean one' in a relationship. It's not universally true, it's just more true than it should be.
Anywho. That's another ramble for another time.
So I tried cleaning the bathtub.
I tried lysol. And scrubbing bubbles. And CLR. And vinegar. And bleach. And Oxy.
NOTHING that I threw at those stupid stains would work. They became the cleanest stain you've ever seen.
Finally, wandering a Bed, Bath, and Beyond - I stumbled on this thing in the beyond section called a 'bath stone'.
I'll admit, I didn't think of the bathtub of doom. I bought it because I had a cleaning supply addiction and it would fit nicely into my harem of sanitation products.
Ok fine. I bought 3.
Long story short - it WORKED. It friggen worked and we finally had a bathtub that didn't look like it belonged on the set of CSI.
After this it was time to tackle the caulk, which appeared to have been applied by a blind monkey who happened to also be really really high.
*sigh* It wasn't the drug abusing monkey. It had been my bf. (duh) What even. He didn't even seem to understand why I looked at him with horror.