Spring Cleaning Like a 1950’s Housewife: The Bathroom

I decided to start my cleaning mania with the bathroom, as it is the most annoying to clean. At least it is for me, personally. Our bathroom window opens up onto our dusty fire escape. Like many Chicagoans, our fire escape is actually more of a wooden porch structure, rather than a pull-down metal device. So let’s say our bathroom window opens onto our luxurious patio (which is about the size of a fire escape). Since my partner is on a constant mission to fight mildew and mold in the bathroom, he opens the window frequently. Regardless of weather. Regardless of the fact that this makes it very uncomfortable to get out the shower in the winter time. He does not care, he has a battle to win.

What I’m saying is that our bathroom is dusty. The dust combines with steam, and turns into grime. Sticky, icky, disgusting grime.

I should also tell you, up front, that our bathroom is tiny. Like, about the size of a queen size bed, maybe.

So to clean it like a dedicated woman of yore, I first removed everything from it. I emptied the shower caddy and took it down. I took everything off the shelves, and then took the shelves themselves out. I emptied the medicine cabinet.

And then, I cleaned it all.

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1950’s Cleaning Supplies

The fact is, my cleaning is already rather old-fashioned. It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that if DIY is an option, I’m probably going to try it. Consequently, I use a lot of castille soap, and vinegar, and baking soda to get things clean. So did a lot of housewives in the past. While the 1950’s was an era of new products and consumerism, lots of people, like me, were pretty cheap. In addition to being inexpensive, these products are lighter on the environment, due to less packaging and fewer things that are harder for the earth to get rid of (I’m not going to say “chemicals” because everything is made of chemicals).

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Spring Cleaning Like a 1950’s Housewife

Easter is over, Passover is coming to an end, and the forsythia down the street is blooming. You know what that means…time for me to have a horrible idea!

Also, it’s spring.

Things have been getting a little grimy here at home, and with spring comes a desire to clean things up a bit. And then I noticed my schedule is open for the next few days, and the weather’s decent, and…I decided to do an old-fashioned spring cleaning.

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What to Grow in a Historically Accurate Victory Garden

Since my last post, I’ve done a little research on varieties of seeds available during WWII, for the utmost historical accuracy. I anticipated this being a research hunt of epic proportions, leading to visiting museums and calling people on the phone, and analyzing photographs of gardens.

It was much, much easier.

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Victory!

I haven’t had a garden since 2008, when I moved out of my first apartment. I had dug out a little section by the driveway, and filled it with tomatoes and sunflowers and marigolds and weeds. I haven’t had space since then, and routinely miss the deadlines for signing up for the community gardens in my neighborhood. Not this year, I vowed. I set a calendar alarm for the moment registration began at the Peterson Garden Project location near my apartment. All summer long I had walked by it with envy and longing. I got my slot. A 4×8 garden bed shall be mine!

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