This $1 Kitchen Tool Is the One Thing Helping Me Keep My Bathtub Clean

I truly hate trying to keep certain areas of my home clean. There are a few spots that just seem to be extra grimy all the time. For a long time, one of those spots in my home was in the bathroom: my clawfoot tub. 

The clawfoot tub was actually one of the elements that first sold me on my house in New Orleans’ Broadmoor neighborhood. Long have I fantasized about having my very own bathroom with my very own romantic clawfoot tub! It’s a dream come true in many ways, but that’s not to say there haven’t been challenges. 

My boyfriend and I rarely take baths in our clawfoot tub, but we do use it daily for showering, and that daily use was causing a lot of soap scum to build up along the tub’s inner walls, edges, and especially around the drain. Living in a very old house with questionable plumbing (and the occasionally very slow-draining drain) only exacerbated the grimy film that always seemed to be in the tub.

I hated when it was time to clean the bathroom and I had to spray the tub down with chemical cleaners and get on my hands and knees and scrub. I appreciate people who have the passion and motivation to regularly scrub their shower but the usual way of tackling this home task just wasn’t for me.

But then I discovered the secret shower cleaning hack that works brilliantly for me, and it may just work for you as well: Clean the shower while you’re in the shower! 

Or, more specifically, right after you’ve finished rinsing off your body, take a minute or two to scrub and rinse off the tub (or tiles, if you have them) before turning off the water and toweling yourself off. It’s much easier to clean your tub of any soap and grime while it’s still wet/before it dries. I’ve read about people keeping cleaning products in their shower to spritz after, but my process is actually cleaning supplies-free. I just use whatever leftover soap that was already in the tub to help clean it. 

I’ve read before of someone who does a similar after-bathing cleaning job by using their bath towel to wipe the shower down after every use. I actually use another method, and while it might seem a bit odd or out of place, it’s worked wonders for me!

I call it my shower sponge. It’s just a regular-old kitchen sponge I keep alongside my shampoo, conditioner, and body wash. Like the kind of sponge that is less than $1 a piece! After I’ve rinsed myself off, I take the sponge and wipe all along the tub edges and walls. We have a clawfoot-tub shower curtain, and so I often will scrub the bottom edge of that a little bit, too. After I’m done giving everything a wipe down, I rinse the sponge out, wring it out as dry as I can, and then get on with the rest of my after-shower routine.