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The Bathroom; ceiling, walls, caulk, paint and repair

Now its time to work on the bathroom walls, ceiling, get simple repairs and painting done including touch-ups.

Bathrooms have a tendency to stay a little moist. Or if yours is like mine, a lot moist depending on the time of year.  Moisture has a way of damaging paint. If you have some leftover paint for the bathroom, why not give it a touch-up today?  Maybe you’ve got time to paint your bathroom completely. I will probably paint the door and window frames today and a bothersome area on the ceiling.

Be sure you clean the tops of the window frames and door frames today, as well as the area between wall and tiles if you have a partial tile job in the bathroom. My tile goes about 3/4 of the way up the wall and then its dry wall up to the ceiling. The wall inside the tub and shower area is tile too.
Lets go ahead and clean the ceiling today, too. If we clean the ceiling now, the cleaning solution won’t drip down on newly cleaned and painted or touched up walls tomorrow!

So today I will scrub the tile, bleach it, clean the dry wall, clean the ceiling and make touch ups with paint on the wall. First I will use a coat of a mildew and mold proof paint like Kilz. Once that dries, I will add the colored paint.

If you do have mold or mildew on the ceiling, get yourself a ladder (please be careful!) and wipe down the ceiling with a bleach and water solution. This can be dangerous because of the fumes. You’ll need to wear plastic gloves too, of course that is up to you. You can also make a mild bleach and water solution and spray it on the ceiling, but then you have the potential for it to drip down on you. Be careful to remove the shower curtain and window curtains, towels etc. from the room if you use bleach.

You can also do some caulking today if you have caulk. I have some left over from the last time we caulked the tub, and its still looking pretty good… but there are one or two places that need help. I will caulk it today, let it dry all night and then tomorrow it will be able to stand up to water and to the tub and shower cleaning I want to do tomorrow.

Spend today cleaning walls and ceiling, window and door frames, making those small repairs, touch-ups and little touches that maybe no one else sees but that make the difference in the room.

13 Comments

  1. Marty

    Hello. I am looking for Week 3, Day 1, cabinets, drawers, and shelves.
    I had linked to your posts before so I could easily find them again.
    Week 3, Day 1 gives me an error.
    Can you please help me find it? Thank you.

  2. yvonne

    Sugar soap is also good for cleaning grout I’ve found, maybe it’s called something else in the States? It’s sugar soap here in the U.K 🙂

    • Sylvia

      I think its called soft scrub here …. same ingredients.

  3. Santa Barbara Plumbing

    great job sylvia…my problem is that its too hard to clean the dirty, yellowish tiles…please teel me an effective solution for this…

  4. Karen

    Hi! I finally got started in the bathroom today. I made a brave step and got rid of my 80’s curlers!! Goodbye big hair!!! LOL!! I have 2 bathrooms and a linen closet. They are small but a bit overwhelming all the same!!

    For grout, I loved “Lysol Mildew and Stain Remover”. It utilizes bleach but seems to work even faster.

  5. Jennifer

    I am almost done with one bathroom for the day- including laying new floor! I only have the places where the tiles have to be cut to be done. My bathroom will probably wait a couple of days because I want the kids taking baths in my bathroom until their floor has time to set as an extra precaution because they have a tendency to get quite a bit of water on the floor.

  6. Cecily

    Tina-

    That’s what I found too. I also found lots of expired medicine- so I flushed it and pitched the bottles. I used to use a lot of perfumed lotions and I don’t now. I had some that were brand new, so I’m going to put them in my gift box. I was really surprised at the extra storage baskets I now have to use somewhere else.

  7. Tina Lahr

    I one thing I have discovered, with all the cleaning and tossing out, is that I need to make sure that I’m out of something before I buy again. And make sure I use the product until the bottle is empty. How many lotions can one use at one time? Also, I do not need more storage and need less stuff! I’m certainly going to make an effort to just buy what I need (I thought I already did that). I know it’s strange that spring cleaning can have an impact on your life, you sure do have a lot of time to think while doing it, but it’s made me think about the blessing I receive every day with out spending money.

    • Sylvia

      Tina, some shower curtains can be washed in the washing machine on gentle cycle…..

    • Sylvia

      I sure am glad you mentioned that, Tina. I think of those things, too. I think about how much we waste and I really try hard not to buy things until we’ve used up what we have. I try hard not to waste but invariable, we do waste things.

  8. Cecily

    Thanks for the vinegar tip. Our shower curtain is clear plastic, with frogs and stuff on it, but it’s got that icky soap film on the back. I’ll try that. I cleaned my walls last week, but need to do the door and window frames. Then I have to tackle my basement, should have tried to do that some last week with the living room b/c it is another living area, but didn’t get to it. So we’ll see what happens this week.

  9. Serena

    Hey guys-
    I fell off the bandwagon and have some catching up to do. But I figured I would hop into where we are, and just do a bit extra catch up each day.

    Sylvia- Do you have any tips for cleaning grout? The walls in my bathroom are tiled. I had thought about putting in new caulk, but mine is not white, it is actually a blue hue to match the tub and tiles, so I am looking for a technique to get in and clean that out. Some spots it looks like it may have mildew.

    Also any suggestions for tough water and soap stains on shower doors? I use cleaner and a squeegie, but it just takes the top layer of grim off.

    Thanks so much 🙂

    • Sylvia

      Hi Serena,
      Good to see you back 😀
      I have grout in my bathroom too, walls and floors both. My grout is white so I bleach it. I would think you could use bleach to clean mold or mildew off yours as well. I have seen products especially made for cleaning grout and have used one once. You spread it on the grout and wait, then rinse it off. I always found that bleach worked as well, but there may be something about bleach that could damage grout? I don’t know.
      If you just have some mildew you may be able to get by with using vinegar to clean the grout.
      Vinegar is good also for getting water and soap stains off glass and plastic. If its just not strong enough there are products made for that purpose. One I have used is called CLR.