Expert Tips to Cut Your Bathroom Cleaning Time in Half

Let’s be real: between work, family, and trying to enjoy everything Chicago has to offer, finding time for a deep clean can feel impossible. Your bathroom, in particular, can become a daunting chore. But what if you could cut that cleaning time in half and get back to your life? We’ve gathered expert-backed, real-life strategies to help you clean smarter, not harder.

We sat down with cleaning insights (inspired by pros like Melissa Maker) to transform your approach. These aren’t just tips; they’re lifestyle changes that prevent messes before they start, saving you precious hours every week.

1. Declutter Your Surfaces First

This one’s tough for product lovers, but it’s a game-changer. Every bottle, jar, and tube on your counter is a dust magnet and an extra surface to wipe. Streamline your routine or find stylish storage. Less stuff literally means less cleaning. A clear counter makes weekly upkeep a breeze and is the first step toward a maintenance-free space.

2. Master the “Shower-While-You-Clean” Method

This isn’t a TikTok trend—it’s a classic time-saver. Keep a dish wand (filled with unscented soap or a vinegar mix) in the shower. After you’ve washed up, quickly scrub the tiles from top to bottom, then rinse. You’ve just extended your shower by 3 minutes instead of parsing out 30 minutes later to scrub. It’s the ultimate hack for consistent apartment cleaning without it feeling like a chore.

Pro Tip: Fight the Smell

If you hate the smell of cleaning products in your shower, add 10-15 drops of your favorite essential oil to the dish wand. It makes the task feel more spa-like and less like a chore.

3. Your Toilet is Not a Trash Can

Hair, floss, wipes—these belong in the garbage, not the toilet. Using it as a trash can leads to clogs and much nastier clean-ups. Keep a small bin nearby and save yourself the headache (and the plumber’s bill).

4. The 60-Second Rule: Always Squeegee

This is the single most effective habit for preventing soap scum. After every shower, take 60 seconds to squeegee the walls and glass. This removes water and the residue that causes buildup. Do this, and you’ll rarely need intense deep cleaning help for your shower. It’s a verb now: squeegeeing. Make it part of your routine.

5. Clean in Two Stages: Pre-Treat, Then Wipe

Stop spraying and wiping immediately. Instead, walk around your bathroom and pre-treat all problem areas—the shower, sink, toilet bowl. Let the cleaner sit and break down grime while you do another quick task. Then, come back and wipe/scrub. The product does the heavy lifting, slashing your scrubbing time. This method is a cornerstone of efficient professional home cleaning.

6. ABC: Always Be Circulating (Air)

Turn on the exhaust fan during and for at least 30 minutes after your shower. This sucks out moisture that breeds mold, mildew, and that pink bacterial film. No fan? Open a window. A dry bathroom is a clean bathroom and prevents weekly scrubbing battles.

7. Banish “Bathroom Slime” for Good

That crusty gunk on bottles and toothbrushes? It’s preventable.

• Toothbrushes: Rinse thoroughly, run fingers through the bristles, and shake dry before putting it away.
• Shower Bottles: While showering, give bottles a quick rinse and dry them with your towel before placing them back. This stops slime from building up on shelves.

This simple maintenance eliminates grime that would otherwise require a dedicated cleaning service near me to tackle.

8. Hang Your Towels to Dry—Fully

A damp towel tossed on a hook creates musty smells and adds to bathroom humidity. Always spread towels out fully on a bar or over the shower curtain rod to dry. Dry towels smell fresh and don’t contribute to moisture problems.

9. Close the Lid Before You Flush

Here’s a gross but vital fact: “Toilet plume”—the microscopic spray from flushing—can travel up to 6 feet, landing on your toothbrush and counters. Closing the lid contains the mess and drastically reduces bacterial spread. It’s a classy and hygienic habit.

10. Conquer the “Triple Threat” Daily

The mirror, sink, and faucet area get dirty fastest from toothpaste splatters and soapy water drips. Keep a dedicated microfiber cloth on the counter (or use your hand towel just before washing it) to give these three spots a quick daily wipe. This 30-second habit prevents buildup and means you rarely need to schedule a cleaning just to deal with a grimy sink.

Putting It All Together

Incorporate even a few of these habits, and you’ll transform your bathroom from a weekly chore into an easily maintained space. The goal is to spend less time cleaning and more time living. And remember, for those times when life gets too busy, or you just want a truly fresh start, there’s always a trusted Chicago cleaning company ready to help. Sometimes, the best way to clean your apartment is to let the pros handle it.

If you’ve got better things to do with your time than scrub a bathroom, I’m with you. I mean, look at mine. It’s a little bit upside down right now. But I have some expertbacked tips and tricks and techniques that you can use to cut your bathroom cleaning time in half. My name is Melissa Maker. I’m an accidental cleaning expert. And for someone that hates cleaning, that’s a challenge. I had to overcome it and learn all of the ways to make cleaning quicker and more efficient and get better results in less time. That’s exactly what I’m going to share with you today. And by the way, if you haven’t done so already, make sure that you subscribe to the Clean MySpace channel so you can get tips like this all the time. I know this one’s going to be hard for beauty junkies, but reducing the amount of stuff you have on your bathroom surfaces makes a huge difference in terms of reducing the amount of time you have to spend cleaning. More stuff, more clutter. And I know in the past when I’ve had lots of bottles of like skin care products and hair products, they are a little bit oily and they are dust magnets. They get dirty and gross. So if you can streamline that skin care routine, reduce the amount of product you have or if you’re going to keep it, at least find a good place to store it so that your counter spaces and any other surfaces you have in your bathroom aren’t cluttered up with product. Less stuff, less cleaning. Contrary to popular belief, cleaning your shower tiles with a dishw while you’re in the shower did not become a thing because of Tik Tok. This is an OG cleaning tip. We’ve been talking about this for at least a decade. And why? It works. If you don’t like getting into your shower on, say, a random Wednesday evening when you feel the urge to clean it, you can just clean it while you’re in there. I mean, who doesn’t like spending a few more minutes in the shower? And if you want to clean your shower tiles, this is actually a pretty efficient way to do it. Once you’ve cleaned yourself, you can take your dish wand, just give it, you know, wet it down, and then start scrubbing the tiles as you go. What you want to make sure is that the floors aren’t slippery. So, just be mindful where you’re stepping. Uh, but you’re going to scrub top to bottom, left to right. You can go area by area, and then you can rinse the shower down, that you can give yourself a nice final cleaning, and then squeegee everything dry. The reason this kind of saves time is because you don’t have to parse out additional time through your week to clean the shower. You just kind of extend your shower. And if you don’t want your shower to smell like a cleaning job, you can actually use unscented dish soap in your dishwarts dish soap and vinegar. If you don’t like the smell of vinegar in your shower, and honestly, I can’t blame you. Add about 10 or 15 drops of your favorite essential oil to that dishwash. Shake it up and it will help take the edge off. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Toilets are for bodily functions and toilet paper and nothing else because if you use them like your own personal garbage can, they will clog and you will have to spend more time dealing with toilet issues and cleaning the bathroom. So, hair wads, dental floss, baby wipes, all that stuff gets pitched in the garbage. Leave your toilet to handle toilet paper and waste. On the topic of cleaning your shower, every single time you step out of that shower, stop yourself and say, “Did I squeegee today?” And if you haven’t, add a few extra steps to your daily step count. Get your squeegee and start to squeegee the shower. It takes under a minute and it makes all the difference. I have been preaching the benefits of squeegeeing, which is now a verb, your shower for years and years and years. And the reason this is so important to do is because as you shower, as you wash things off your bod, it flicks itself onto shower glass and tiles. Then you step out like the classy person you are, and you just think it’s going to dry and deal with itself. Well, what happens is once the water dissipates, that residue is left behind from anything that came off your body or that was stuck in the water minerals. So, what you get over time is soap scum. If you squeegee your shower and just use a rubber blade to get all of that off the shower tiles, you end the glass. You will never have to worry about buildup ever. When you’re cleaning the bathroom, don’t think about spraying and wiping. Think about cleaning your bathroom in two stages. First, pre-treating and then second, wiping and scrubbing. If you do it all at once, you will actually spend more time because product won’t have had the chance to work, whether it’s cleaning soap scum in your shower or a grimy sink. If you pre-treat areas in your bathroom, so you work your way around the bathroom, kind of spray it down, let the product do its work, and then get back to your starting point and start cleaning, the product will have done the heavy lifting for you. Get out the appropriate cleaning tool, and your work will be slashed. Once I started incorporating this into my own cleaning routine, as well as the way that I would clean professionally and train people to clean, game changer. I know you’ve probably heard ABC, always be something applied in a million different ways. And I’m going to give you a million and one. Always be chilling or always be turning your fan on when you’re showering and after. And now I’m going to turn it off cuz it’s affecting my audio right now. The reason you want to have your fan on while you are showering as well as after is because your fan’s job is to suck up the moisture that would otherwise be lingering in your bathroom, feeding bacteria that then becomes mold and mildew and that pinky orangey stuff that everyone complains about. If you get rid of moisture, your bathroom won’t be a tropical environment that is ideal for bacteria, mold, and mildew to fester. It’s a simple fix. We actually have one of those timer fans. So, I set it for 30 minutes when I step into the shower and then on my way out of the bathroom, I just hit it for 30 minutes again. It runs for about an hour and by the time I go back into my bathroom, say an hour and a bit later. It feels just fine. Now, if you don’t have a fan, don’t fear. Open your window instead. And if your bathroom isn’t ventilated, you need to talk to a building inspector. We all know things can get slimy in the bathroom. And if you think about what happens in the bathroom, there’s a lot of bacteria coming from our mouths, stuff coming off of our body. There’s soap, there’s water. I mean, it’s the perfect malange for slime. Okay, so there are a few different ways that you can eliminate that slimy buildup that you will then have to spend so much time cleaning if you didn’t think ahead. First place I want to talk about is the toothbrush. Whether it’s an electric toothbrush or a manual toothbrush, if you brush, rinse, and stick it back wherever it lives, undoubtedly you’re going to see that white crusty buildup. That’s not only toothpaste, but it also is oral bacteria that just gets crusty and starts feeding on things. So, what you can do to never see that again, never have to clean that again, is to rinse your toothbrush thoroughly. I also like to run my fingers through the bristles to really flick off all the stuff and then dry your toothbrush. If it’s dry and you put it back, just like when we squeegee the shower, there’s going to be no crust. The other place I see a lot of slimy, grimy stuff is bottles in the shower, soap, shampoo, that kind of thing. So, if you notice that that’s happening, just hold your bottle up while you’re in the shower. Kind of give it its own shower, and then you can even dry it with your towel and pop it back. Now, I know it might sound counterintuitive. Why am I drying something only to put it back in a wet shower? It just gets rid of that slimy stuff that will only end up sitting on the ledge, feeding bacteria that will then cause mold, mildew, or soap scum, or things that you’re going to have to spend more time cleaning. You’re welcome. This is legitimately one of the biggest arguments my best friend and her husband has. She’s not great at hanging her towels up, and he is fidious about it. So, the two of them argue about towels all the time. And frankly, I got a side with him because she’s not hanging up her towels properly and that means they are not drying. Air is not circulating through those towels. They are getting musty. They are getting smelly and they are adding to the moisture in the bathroom. So, the name of the game here is to dry your towels fully after a shower. And the best way to do that is to spread them out nice and open on a towel bar. If you don’t have one, consider flipping your towel over your shower curtain rack just to let it dry. A dry towel is a towel that doesn’t smell and is a towel that doesn’t contribute to a moisture issue in your bathroom. There are a few things in life we probably would like to never know about. One of which my friend recently taught me is called fecal veneer, which is just a layer of you know what on just about everything we touch. Another thing I’m going to tell you about is toilet plume, which is the spray that comes out of your toilet every time you flush it. And it is estimated that that spray reaches about 6 ft, which is probably the distance between your toilet and your toothbrush. So, close the lid before you flush. And by doing this, not only are you keeping things classy, but you’re actually reducing the amount of bacterial spread in a bathroom. Quick and easy. One of the first things you see in a bathroom is this setup right here. The mirror, the sink, and the faucet. And what happens? These get dirty very quickly. So, if you can keep a cleaning cloth on your counter, you can deal with the triple threat of toothpaste on the mirror, schmutz in your sink, and handwashing water from building up around your faucet. Don’t know what I’m talking about? The next time you go to your bathroom, look around your faucet. You might actually see a buildup of discolored water or grime and you’ll be like, “Where did that come from?” I’ll tell you. It comes from your dirty hands or your clean hands that have soap residue on them. When you go to shut your faucet off, water drips off of your hands and just settles and over time that builds up and it discolors. So, if you can keep a cloth there, you can quickly wipe away anything that splatters on the mirror, in the sink, or any water buildup around the faucet. Now, if you don’t want to keep a cloth on your counter, I feel you. Instead, anytime that banged the wall, you change out your hand towel. You can just quickly take it and wipe that triple threat situation up. The mirror, the sink, and the area by the faucet, toss this in the washing machine, replace your hand towel, and your bathroom will be maintained. Those are things that build up and get nasty quickly. So, this is an easy, quick way that you can maintain that triple threat. So, now you’ve got these expertbacked cleaning tips, tricks, and techniques that you can incorporate into your bathroom cleaning so that you can cut your cleaning time in half in here and spend less time getting ready in here to do things that are fun, not clean. And that brings me to this week’s comment question, which is, what is the one thing in your bathroom that you hate cleaning the most? Is it the shower? Is it the tub? Is it the cocking in the tile? Is it the grout? Is it the toilet? Let me know in the comments down below. If you want to learn more about cleaning tips, tricks, and techniques, as well as get product recommendations sent right to your inbox, you can sign up for our email newsletter. It’s called The Dirty Dish, and I’ve got a link for you down below. Also, if you love what we do here at Clean My Space, you could consider supporting us by becoming a member. Now, since we’re in the bathroom, one of the things that we deal with from time to time is mold. And if you want to know how to live in a mold-free home, you can click this video right over here and learn more about a very unappealing subject. Thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you next