What no one ever tells you when you get your bathroom refurbished is that London's water is so hard, so calcium-enriched, that it will be impossible to keep chromeware and glass sparkling clean.
Within a day -- yes, one single day -- of having our glass showerscreen installed it became caked in a white chalky residue called limescale. This was before we'd used the shower proper and had resulted simply from the builders checking that the showerhead worked.
Obviously, when we started using our new bathroom, the limescale situation got worse. I have taken to wiping down the the showerscreen with window cleaner every day, to practically no effect, and polishing the taps with a microfibre cloth.
The situation has not been helped by the fact that you can't use ordinary cleaning products on Travertine tiles, so I've had to do a bit of internet research to find something that is safe to use on natural stone but strong enough to remove limescale.
Consequently, I have just spent an hour in the bathroom getting completely high on HG Shower Shield, which supposedly keeps dirt and limescale at bay for months at a time. I used quite a bit of it on the showerscreen, having first removed the limescale using another HG-branded product (it took five goes), and put a few dabs of it on the taps and chrome heated towel rail.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it works. The showerscreen looks amazing right now -- it's sparkling like refracted diamonds -- but goodness knows whether it will survive the twice-daily onslaught of calcium-rich water to which we subject it.
But the shower valve and tap is another story. Despite almost rubbing a hole through the wall, I simply cannot remove the limescale stains from the chromeware. Various products and two different types of microfibre cloths have simply not worked.
There goes any idea of having a stainless steel kitchen -- it'd look shite within a couple of days!
