Recipe for Shower Cleaner

Making Do in Hard Times

I’m not a fan of cleaning the shower. Once, in a frenzy of cleaning, I used two different commercial products that oughtn’t to have been used together, burned my lungs, and ended up at St. Joseph’s for a week with pneumonia and thoraxic surgery. Keeping the shower from getting icky is important to me and so is saving money.

Daily shower cleaner came out in the late 1990s, but my frugality drove me to find a homemade alternative. After all, if you’ve got a large family you’re asking to use it each time they shower, keeping the shower clean can become a spendy proposition.

The Internet is our friend. On AskJeeves.com, now Ask.com, I found what I was looking for and our family has made it ever since:

8 ounces of all purpose cleaner which is probably under your kitchen sink already

16 ounces of rubbing alcohol which if it’s not in your medicine cabinet can be purchased cheaply (get a big bottle so you can get more than one gallon out of it.

Filtered water—the water should be filtered or purified so that you aren’t adding minerals to your shower walls.

Empty clean gallon jug

Measure the first two ingredients into the jug and fill with water. It’s as simple as that. It works as well as any of the daily shower products and keeps the pennies in your pocket. There are other recipes for shower cleaner on the web, but this one is cheap and easy, both favorite adjectives of mine.

Eventually your shower is going to need cleaning no matter what, but if you’re very lucky you have a spouse who remembers the month you spent in bed with pneumonia and will clean it for you occasionally. Thanks, Dave!