T.T.: How To Pickle a Toilet

Just kidding. I don't know how you might pickle a toilet, but I do know that vinegar is an excellent option for cleaning one.

I've used vinegar in a spray bottle for cleaning bathrooms for a long time, but I still bought toilet bowl cleaner. We've always lived in places with hard water, so the toilet bowls would get that annoying mineral ring on the inside and would need to be soaked in toilet bowl cleaner before being scrubbed.

Or so I thought.

I was never a big fan of the smell of the toilet bowl cleaner. It was pretty much just a chemical concentrate. And then, I started to notice that even the kind that I had been buying for years was all of a sudden this very virulent blue color. And it stained my toilet bowl.

I tried another brand. It was a violent green color that also stained my toilet bowl.

My sister the veterinarian told me they started making the cleaners that way so you can tell if there's still any of the chemical in the bowl. Presumably so you don't poison any pets that might be drinking from your toilet bowl? 

I don't know. All I know is that it seemed counter-productive to try to clean my toilet only to end up with a stained toilet bowl.

So I tried vinegar. And it worked.

All I do is pour a few glugs of white vinegar in the toilet bowl and let it sit for awhile. Sometimes I only let it sit as long as it takes me to clean the tub, sink, and floor. Sometimes I leave it in there for a couple of hours. The longer it sits, the better it works, obviously. After it sits for however long, I scrub with the toilet bowl brush.

And then my bathroom smells like pickles for a little while. It goes away quickly, though, and it does work. 

I don't know if it would have worked in northern New York, where we had the hardest water of all. But it works here, and that's all I care about.

I don't have a picture of my toilet (you're welcome), but here's one of Cubby standing on top of the toilet in the kids' bathroom.

He was re-positioning a towel rack for me. I knew encouraging his early love of tools would pay off in the end.