Homemade Cleaners

I started making my own cleaners when my son was a baby.  He was sitting in the bouncy seat in the bathroom doorway while I was cleaning the shower stall and I realized that if my lungs were getting a tickle from breathing the cleaner in then his HAD to be burning.  I looked up a bunch online, tried a few over the past 3 years and here is what I ended up continuing to use:

-Glass Cleaner- 1 tsp dish detergent, 6 Tbsp white vinegar and 4 Cups of Water.

-Straight White Vinegar - I use this for kitchen counters, floors...basically as an all purpose cleaner

-Baking Soda - Great for scrubbing sinks, tubs, toilets.  Anything that you need an abrasive cleaner for.  When I run out, I buy new baking soda from the dollar store and replace the one in my kitchen pantry with it.  Then I take the baking soda that was in my pantry and put it in my cleaner container.  This way the baking soda I use for baking is always fresh.

-Bleach Cleaner - I recently adjusted this mixture after figuring out that my mixture was eating the grout in the shower. (oops!!)  So now I use 1 Tbsp of bleach in a full bottle of water.  Still a little bit high of a mixture but I am slowly trying to break my addiction to bleach.  I use this in the bathroom only.

For awhile I was using a vinegar and olive oil mix for my furniture but I didn't like it.  For now, I am back to using a store cleaner for that but I am on the search for something homemade that I like.  I don't like that the store cleaner makes my floors slick if any of it splatters. 

Both the vinegar and glass cleaner are in bottles that I bought at the dollar store.  I bought 3 bottles for each cleaner so that I have one everywhere I need it: 1 set in the bathroom closet, 1 set under the kitchen sink and 1 set in the laundry room.  The bottles are labeled so that if someone other than me is here, and one of my kids drinks the cleaner, they know exactly what they drank.  Plus I put the uses on the vinegar bottle so that when we started using it my husband would know what he could use it for.  The baking soda is kept in an old Parmesan cheese container so it can be easily sprinkled.  The bleach cleaner is in an old store bought bleach cleaners bottle.  I tried putting it in a dollar store bottle but the bleach will eat the metal spring mechanism. 

These cleaners are super cheap to make.  You can get bleach now at the dollar store and a HUGE container of store brand vinegar is cheap at the supermarket.

Here are my bottles:

I use rags that I got from the dollar store.  They are great.  The green one is for dusting, the middle one (a recent find) is EXCELLENT for keeping your stainless steel sink shiny (I'm actually gona buy another pack of them the next time I go to the dollar store) and the blue one is for glass.  The blue one has a small slit I cut in it so that it can hang on the glass cleaner bottle handle.  I use a lot of paper towels which is horrible, I know.  I'm trying to break myself of that.

While we are on the topic of cleaning, I have to show you these.  They make cleaning so much more fun!

DIVA!!!!!



And here is my new favorite mop.  It's called a T Mop and you use it to push around a wet rag on the floor.  SO much easier then dragging out a big mop and a bucket of nasty water.  Wet a rag in the sink, chuck it on the floor and push it around with the stick!  When you're done you just throw the rag in the wash!