A two-gallon (eight-liter) bucket

A sponge (make sure it's used only in the bathroom, not in food preparation areas)

A flexible scrubber pad (again, keep it out of the kitchen)

A stiff, sturdy nylon brush (the kind you can get a solid grip on)

A pair of rubber gloves

A bathroom cleanser (these can vary from environmentally friendly to very toxic, so be informed about your choice)

Optional:

A used toothbrush (for scrubbing the grout)

A spray-on mildew remover

Fabric softener (for cleaning your shower curtain)

If your bathroom is notably grungy, allocate about an hour for a thorough cleanup and airing-out; after that, a weekly wipedown should take about 10 minutes.

2torial #0444: Learn2 Clean a Bathroom Don't join the Groutful Dread! Nothing else presents a cleaning challenge quite like the tiled areas of your bathroom. The tiles themselves are very smooth-surfaced (making them great receptacles for hardened soap scum), while the areas between them are filled with grout, a porous substance with plenty of nooks and crannies to hold dirt and mildew. Add the high moisture content of a shower and/or tub, the limited ventilation of most bathrooms, and you have a happy breeding ground for grossness. Ironic, isn't it? The place where you go to get clean can easily be the dirtiest place in the house. Fortunately, it's not too hard to successfully do battle against this blight: it just takes the consistent application of a little elbow grease and some specialized cleaning tools. As this 2torial shows, a few swipes a week will keep away the Tile Terrors and the Gross-out Grout. And these guidelines apply to just about any bathroom, whether it's ornately tiled or furnished with simple slabs of fiberglass. Keep in mind that the normal rules of cleaning don't apply here. Normally, if something got dirty you'd use plenty of soap and water to get it clean--but here, soap film and water stains are components of the blight. Essentially, you have three types of cleaning to do: Remove dried-on soapy film Remove water-related stains Remove mildew Of course, there's dirt to be removed here too...but it'll disappear quickly as a side result of those three tasks.   Step 1