Groxie

I’m finally back from all the craziness that was our wedding/honeymoon. Right before all of the family and friends started pouring into town, John and I went on a frenzied cleaning kick to get our apartment ready.Â

I had been trying my hand at making my own cleaners, so I decided to put them to the test. At the same time, we still had lots of not quite empty bottles and cans of normal cleaners that we wanted to use up.

John went to task with the normal cleaners at first, but the fumes made me feel terrible, so we gave up on those early on. The homemade cleaners worked out well, and they didn’t bother my skin or lungs at all.

The Ingredients

• White vinegar
• Baking soda (You can use washing soda for tougher jobs, but it is harsher on skin than the baking soda.)
• Hydrogen peroxide
• Nature’s Miracle (more on this later)
• Dr. Bronner’s Castile Soap (I use the lavender because it is gentlest for my skin, but they have lots of nice smells.)

Bathroom

I have a spray bottle filled with ½ and ½ water and vinegar. I used it to wet down the surfaces in the shower, then I sprinkled baking soda over the surfaces. I sprayed a little more of the vinegar mixture on top of the powder and let it sit for a few minutes. I did need to do a little scrubbing around some of the grosser areas, but no more than with other cleaners. Then I just rinsed everything down with water.

I was pretty amazed at how well this technique worked. I use bath oil on my skin almost everyday, so the shower tends to build up a sticky scum on the bottom. The baking soda seemed to do a much better job of neutralizing the scum than any other cleaner I’ve used before.

The showerhead had some lovely pink mold living on it. To clean it off, I unscrewed the head and dropped it in a bowl of vinegar. I left it there overnight. The next morning I used an old toothbrush to give it a quick scrub, and voila—good as new.

The mirrors clean up fabulously with the vinegar/water mixture, especially if you use newspaper in place of paper towels or rags.

Kitchen

I cleaned the cabinet front and counters off with castile soap. It did a great job of cutting through almost everything. It didn’t work for areas that had caked on grease, though.

For those tougher places, like the top of the stove, I made a paste out of baking soda and water and spread it all over the worst spots. I let it sit for a few minutes, sprayed it down with the vinegar mixture, and scrubbed it away. The paste worked wonders.

Carpets

We didn’t get as much done with the floors as we had hoped. I was planning on trying out some home remedies for carpet stains, but there just wasn’t time to tackle all of the stains. One of John’s co—workers had given him a little bottle of Nature’s Miracle to try. She swears by the stuff, so we decided to try it.

It worked very well with little effort on our part. The problem is I don’t know exactly what is in this stuff. It says it is made up of natural enzymes, but I’m having a hard time finding a list of ingredients. I did discover that Nature’s Miracle is non—toxic, non—acidic, non—caustic, and non—flammable.

Red Wine Stains

We were incredibly lucky on our wedding day, and everything went very smoothly. The biggest catastrophe we had to deal with was John spilling red wine on his beige linen pants and white linen shirt. He dabbed the spots with some mineral water immediately after it happened, and then we treated it later that night at home.

He put equal amounts of Dr. Bronner’s castile soap and hydrogen peroxide on the stain and let it sit for about 10 minutes. After a little bit of scrubbing we dropped the shirt and pants in with a load of laundry. The red wine stains are nowhere to be seen! I’ll use this combination from now on as a stain treatment. Dr. Bronner’s is easy to find at any natural health or grocery store.

I’ll be working on trying out other cleaners as we need them, but these fews little recipes make for tried and true safe cleaners.