Padre Janitorial Service

"If you are dealing with a bathroom at home with a tub or a shower, clean the tub or shower before cleaning the toilet. Your toilet is that last thing to be cleaned. If there was anything particularly infectious in that area, you want to clean that last so that it doesn't get on your other materials." - Brad Stinton

San Diego Reader: Best Buys By Eve Kelly
November 18, 2004

Call me strange, but the holidays make me think of germs. Every year, we have our Thanksgiving feast with husband Patrick's side of the family. The patriarch's home, where the dinner is usually held, crawls with humanity. Hordes of messy, over-stimulated children on a pumpkin-pie high take over the house. Among them, every year, there are quite a few sick kids. "The big germ fest," I call it. Husband Patrick affectionately terms it "sharing the love."

I can't help but think the bathroom might be the spot where the love is being shared. The bathrooms at these events are disgusting. The little guests forget to flush, they pee on the floor, and they don't wash their hands. I want to help keep the germ-spreading to a minimum this year, so I have made it my mission to study Sanitary Bathroom 101.

Brad Stinton, president of Padre Janitorial Service, Inc., gave me the dirty details. "There have been some studies done on cleanliness in the workplace," he explained, "which found a higher concentration and a wider variety of germs on things like desktops and door knobs than on the toilet or the floor in the bathroom. Part of that is because, generally speaking, toilets and floors are cleaned more frequently than the desktops and door handles. I recommend cleaning the door handles every time you clean the bathroom. Make it one of the first things to clean when you start on the wet cleaning, just to make sure you hit it. It is just too easy to forget it at the end [of your cleaning]."

What is the proper order for cleaning a bathroom? Click here to continue...