The $5 Kitchen Tool That’s a Staple in My Bathroom Cleaning Kit

So much of a person’s cleaning practices are picked up from how their parents did things, or perhaps the makeshift and possibly clumsy way they might have taught themself. Whatever way you do things, though, your cleaning habits tend to get cemented over time by habit and thoughtless repetition. And while the why is usually pretty obvious, you rarely pause to consider the how.

This is the way it’s been for me for years when I go to clean the showers, bathtubs, and their glass enclosures. When I go to do a soap scum clean-off or a tile scrub, I dutifully fill my bucket with my cleaner or douse the area with the requisite spray and then I let it sit before I scrub or use a rag to rub with vigor.

The thing about cleaning these areas, though, is that they require rinsing. Unlike wiping down windows or counters, vacuuming, or polishing wooden furniture, cleaning shower and tub floors and walls means rinsing off the product used to deal with the dirt. When you have a hand-held shower sprayer, rinsing the bathroom tile is easy. But rinsing gets trickier when the only water source is a stationary faucet.

In the past, my inefficient habitual method of rinsing involved filling my bucket with clean water for dunking my rag into, or turning on the water and dousing my rag. Then I’d squeeze the saturated rag over the areas that needed rinsing. But now I have a new favorite method that’s so simple but makes such a difference.

My light bulb moment came when watching the stories of my new favorite IG cleaning account that I talk about all the time, Go Clean Co. I saw them using a pitcher to rinse off the suds after a shower scrubbing session and I realized how much faster and better that strategy was. Instead of fussing with a rag and a bucket, I could fill my pitcher with clean water from the shower head or faucet, and rinse my cleaner easily and directly off every inch of the wall.

And the really great thing is: I already have a pitcher in each of my bathrooms — we use them to rinse of the kids in the bath. (The pitchers themselves are actually the pitchers that were used to store my ice water when I was in the hospital having my babies, so they melt me a little each time I see them.)

If you’re in the market, though, this $5 pitcher seems like an even better choice. They’re for rinsing shampoo out of kids’ hair without getting soapy water in their eyes and the flexible mouth of the opening makes them ideal for pressing against a wall or shower door to coax clean water right to where it needs to go.

Whether you have a pitcher you can re-purpose or you pick up a couple just for this job, a rinsing pitcher is my new favorite unexpected addition to my cleaning toolkit.

This post originally appeared on Apartment Therapy. See it there: This $4 Kitchen Tool is a Staple in My Bathroom Cleaning Kit