Recently, I bought a house. Yes, that’s a brag. But also, it is a preface to a real question: How do people house? After a decade in a Brooklyn one-bedroom apartment, there are so many things that I have to learn about it. Like how to clean a garbage disposal, how to properly load a dishwasher, and what to do with more than one bedroom. And then there are the more pressing queries, like—how do I get this far-from-new toilet to be less gross?
In Philadelphia, where the aforementioned house is, the water is pretty hard, which means that there’s mineral build-up in the bathroom, and that the bottom of the bowl of the toilet was coated in an extremely unappealing layer of brown-yellow gunk. When my partner saw it, he assumed it meant that the family in the house before us was a big believer in if it’s yellow let it mellow. But after attempting my usual toilet scrubbing methods—Scrubbing Bubbles and a toilet brush—I found out that hard water stains are a good bit more resilient than I’d hoped.