Bad Housekeeping Ideas

E's comment yesterday reminded me of a baaaad thing I did years ago.

Our 1950's house was blessed with an icky pink-and-black color scheme in the bathroom. When we first moved in, the walls were covered with pink-and-black flowered wallpaper, and the shower curtain (so thoughtfully left behind) was gray with pink cabbage roses and trimmed with little pink pom-poms along the edges, kind of like your friend's bedroom curtains back when you were eight or nine.

I've lived in this area all my life, and the house we have now is similar to the one in which I grew up. These two houses had one other thing in common: Bathroom mildew. For whatever reason, mildew always collected on the painted ceiling above the shower area. In my mother's house, this was a particularly ugly problem, because she got the notion, back in '63, to stipple the paint on the bathroom walls. I remember the points on that stippling actually being ouchy to my little-kid hands when they missed the light switch. I don't know how she did that.

Back to 1994. My bathroom had the same mildew problem, and The Oracle bought a gallon of Kilz to paint the bathroom and put an end to the mildew. It was my job to scrub off the old paint.

I've long since forgotten what product I bought for this task. I do remember putting it off until The Oracle became annoyed (once again) with my procrastinating. (Can you blame me, really?). In a huff, I grabbed the bottle off the shelf and made a rough solution of it in the bathroom sink. I donned my gloves and sunglasses (thank God!) and set to work.

Wow, what amazing results. That mold gave way easily under that cleaner. I barely had to scrub. Better still, there wasn't even a stain on the paint from where the mildew used to be.
I clear off all the mildew, and I wonder whether I'm supposed to rinse afterward since I diluted it at the start. I pick up the bottle to read the directions.

Uh-oh. I guess I'd better rinse thoroughly. In my haste, I didn't use the cleaner I bought for the job. Instead, I absently grabbed it's lookalike neighbor, the Drano. Yep, Drano. I cleaned my bathroom ceiling with Drano.

To this day, I don't recall what it was I'd planned to use, but its bottle was either a dark orange or it was also red like the Drano. It's a wonder I didn't create (or pass out from) any toxic fumes. I'm also thankful that the paint never peeled off.

And I'm very grateful that, thanks to Kilz, I've never had to scrub mildew off the ceiling for many years now.