How to Clean Shower Tiles Without Scrubbing

Introduction

No one likes a dirty shower. It’s unsightly and ironic that the place where you clean your body is dirty. But cleaning a shower isn’t on anyone’s ideal to do list because it can be time consuming and difficult, especially if there’s a lot of scrubbing involved. Luckily for you, this article will teach you how to clean shower tiles without scrubbing.

First, we’ll review how your shower becomes dirty and then get into the details of how to easily and effectively clean your shower.

How Shower Tiles Get Dirty

It’s strange that the tiny room you go into to get clean can get dirty, but it does and it happens fast. There are two main ways a shower gets dirty, soap scum and dirt buildup. Let’s look at both now.

Soap Scum

Soap scum is a common one and makes the most sense seeing that’s the main purpose of a shower. It’s probably what you think of when you think about a dirty shower or shower tiles. It looks like a residue that sits on the shower tiles and even on the floor of the shower.

Luckily for you, soap scrum is easy to clean off. It just sits on top of the tiles and can easily be wiped off with a wet cloth or cleaning solution.

However, it’s unsightly and no one wants to shower in a dirty shower. Next up we’ll look at something a little more difficult to remove, which happens if you don’t regularly clean the soap scum.

Dirt and Grime Buildup

Dirt and grime buildup occurs in your shower when it’s gone a while without a good cleaning. While soap scum is easily removable with a wet cloth and cleaning solution, dirt and grime buildup is more difficult because it becomes caked on to your shower.

This type of buildup occurs when regular dirt or even soap scum has had time to build up, aptly named right?

If you go a while without cleaning your shower, you might encounter this kind of build up, but it’s not impossible to clean, just a little more difficult than regular soap scum.

Now, let’s start talking about how to clean shower tiles without scrubbing.

How to Clean Shower Tiles without Scrubbing

Now that you know how shower tiles get dirty, it’s time to talk about how to clean that dirt without scrubbing. If you’re anything like me or millions of others, scrubbing is the worst part about cleaning.

In the following section, we’ll look at choosing a cleaning solution, how to apply that to your shower tiles, and finally rinse it off for a sparkling clean look. Let’s dive in.

Choose a Cleaning Solution

The first thing you have to do is either purchase or create a cleaning solution. With so many people becoming more and more worried about chemicals, we’ve laid out two options below, both a traditional cleaner and an organic, safe alternative.

Let’s look at both options together.

Non-Organic Solution

There is no shortage of cleaning solutions out there and you’ve probably seen commercials for many of them. However, not all of them allow you to clean your shower tiles without scrubbing. Most actually require some amount of scrubbing.

There are a few products though that will you allow you to just spray the solution on the dirty shower tiles, wait, and then rinse off to reveal sparkling clean tiles. A few of those products are listed below and can be purchased at Target, Walmart, or Amazon:

Both of those cleaning solutions are widely available, effective, and don’t require any scrubbing.

Organic Solution

If you’re looking to avoid cleaning chemicals, which is becoming more and more common today, then you can still create a cleaning solution with products in your pantry.

We’ve written about using vinegar as a cleaning solution in the past in the following articles, so you know we’re a fan of the power of vinegar.

Combine 1 part white vinegar with 3 parts water and stir thoroughly so the vinegar and water create a cleaning solution. You’ll use this cleaning solution the same as the cleaning solution in the previous section.

The benefits here are that it is organic and non-toxic, however it might require some repeat cleaning and a little bit of scrubbing if it doesn’t work the first time.

Spray Cleaning Solution on Shower Tiles

Once you have your cleaning solution, it’s time to spray it on the shower tiles. Make sure to start at the top of the shower tiles because it will drip down the shower wall.

The traditional products will normally have a spray bottle, but if you’ve gone with the organic cleaning solution of vinegar and water, you can just pour it on the shower tiles and wipe it around with a wet cloth.

A few things to keep in mind here are to thoroughly coat the shower tiles with your cleaning solution. The more cleaning solution you use, the more effective it will be in removing the dirt and grime. Just make sure not to use the entire bottle if you’ve gone with the traditional cleaning solution.

Make sure to get in between the tiles because that’s where dirt likes to sit and is the hardest area to remove dirt from.

Once you feel you’ve thoroughly coated the dirty shower tiles with the cleaning solution, you can move onto the next step.

Let Solution Absorb Into Dirty Shower Tiles

This is the easiest step in cleaning your dirty shower tiles without scrubbing. Just wait.

You need to give the cleaning solution time to soak into the dirt and start breaking it up and you do that just by waiting.

The traditional cleaning solutions likely have instructions on the bottle on how long to wait. If you’re using the vinegar cleaning solution, then wait about 5-10 minutes. That should be enough time for the vinegar to soak into the dirt and grime and start breaking it down.

Easy, right?

Rinse

In a traditional cleaning process, this step might be to start scrubbing, but we want to do this cleaning without any scrubbing. The cleaning solution you either bought or made should have had enough time to sit on top of the dirt and grime and break it down.

Now, all you need to do is rinse the shower tiles with water to clean off both the cleaning solution and dirt. If the cleaning solution did it’s job, then you should be rinsing away the dirt as well.

If you find that there is still dirt on the shower tiles, then you might have a particularly hard to remove dirt, but it won’t be impossible to remove.

Repeat the cleaning process up to this point so far, but this time you might want to try a little light scrubbing to see if you can remove the hard to remove dirt and grime.

Dry Shower Tiles with Towel

The last step is to dry off the shower tiles with a towel. This will do two things.

First, it will ensure that there is no cleaning solution or dirt and grime left over after rinsing. This is good to do because left over dirt or cleaning solution can leave marks on the tiles and you want everything to be sparkling right after cleaning.

Second, it will remove any water marks. Yes, I realize it’s a shower and you’ll have water marks after your first shower, but sometimes water doesn’t make it to the top of the shower tiles and it’s just nice to have everything be sparkling clean once you’re done cleaning.

And that’s it. A quick and easy tutorial on how to clean shower tiles without scrubbing.

Conclusion

By this point, you should have a good idea of how your shower gets dirty and how to clean it when it gets to that point.

We first reviewed the most common reasons for a dirty shower. Soap scum is inevitable, but if you fail to clean it off regularly, it can turn into dirt build up, which is more difficult, but not impossible to remove.

Next, we looked at how to actually clean your shower without scrubbing, including both organic and non-organic cleaning solutions.

Hopefully you’ve learned something useful from this article and can apply it to your regular cleaning schedule for a sparking clean shower.