Glass cleaner = one part vinegar + one part water

That about sums it up. That, and it left my glass-topped table squeaky clean yesterday.

Mama loves her some Borax.

After Larms introduced us all to Borax awhile back, I just had to buy some. Turns out that was a smart move because it doesn’t just clean toilets. In fact, I’m discovering that much like our good friends baking soda and vinegar, it can be used for basically everything.

For starters, I whipped up a batch of that dishwasher detergent I mentioned the other day and it works GREAT! The actual recipe I used was simply one part Borax and one part baking soda, plus some salt because that was recommended in some places (didn’t bother to figure out why). Although citric acid was also recommended frequently, Whole Foods doesn’t sell it (and it’s probably pricey), so I skipped it. I threw some vinegar in the rinse dispenser and the dishes came out squeaky clean!

I also started using it in my laundry as a stain-remover (just add 1/2 c. per load), something I had been meaning to look into ever since my spray bottle of Shout ran out a month ago. Of course, I hadn’t gotten to it yet. Enter Borax! Today a white shirt with at least one-day-old frozen blueberry stains (and you know those are NO JOKE) came out completely spotless.

That’s all I’ve had time to play around with, but just from reading the back of the box it claims to clean garbage disposals, be great for hand-washing your delicates, make your clothes smell cleaner and fresher, and clean carpets. If we’ve learned anything by now, it’s that those ideas are only the tip of the iceberg.

(Also, in case you sticklers out there have been wondering, I AM aware that these cleaning materials we’ve been talking about are, in fact, chemical compounds and that we need to come up with a more accurate name for this quest for the natural and/or non-toxic than “Chemical-Free”.)

Ants in my dishwasher

No, I don’t have those. But I ran across a blog post somewhere that began with a girl pouring Kool-Aid in her dishwasher and ended with a very unfortunate ant infestation.

My guess is she tried a sub-par or incomplete version of this and something went horribly awry.

To avoid any risk of ants, and to avoid giving money to companies cranking out gratuitous, childhood-obesity-inducing products, I’ll skip the Kool-Aid, but I’m totally going to try that recipe. Tomorrow. Right after I whip up that batch of toothpaste. I swear.

(Note, some more googling reveals that the above-linked recipe might be geared toward advanced eco-home-makers and/or those who really like their dishes to be sparkling, and that you can probably get away with fewer ingredients.

Bare minimum = one part baking soda and one part Borax + vinegar for the rinsing agent. Suck on that, Jet-Dry.)

And is anyone else noticing that the ingredient-trend in our homemade cleaning products is becoming downright…obvious?

Update: I am not happy with how well the bare minimum works. I would say go for the full recipe if you’re going to try it!

Two more planned baby steps

The post below was written by Larms a few weeks ago. She’s the type of hyper-organized person who takes the time to queue up a bunch of articles for her blog before her first child’s arrival so that you won’t miss her while she’s out on maternity leave. (Is there such a thing for the blogosphere? Well, anyway, she’s on it!) Check out the beautiful baby boy!

Then read her post, which I apologize is slightly out of order because this blog’s dumb admin screwed up the sequence. (You can find the results of her toilet-cleaning experiments here!)

(This is hearkening back to the whole reducing-chemical-use topic from a few weeks ago…I promise, we haven’t fallen off the wagon on it! I’ve got a big ol’ bag of baking soda just waiting to show this dirty house – okay, parts of it – who’s boss)

I tend to get very gung-ho about things like this! I have a big stockpile of some traditional cleaning products I’m trying to foist off on others so I can REALLY get into it. So, two things in the works:

I am fired up about toilet bowl cleaning, people. We installed new water-saver toilets when we moved in, but still abide by the old “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” rule to save water and do not flush, um, with every liquid-visit. While water-friendly, this can however make for some funky toilets that require that adherence to a rigorous cleaning schedule. There’s apparently a litany of various Borax/vinegar/baking soda concoctions online for me to test out. Hopefully I don’t accidentally turn our toilets into meth labs somehow.

And a shameful confession! We have gotten very, very lazy about overusing Clorox-type wipes. I first started buying the wipes for basically one purpose: to wipe the particularly nasty parts of the toilet. But then we started using them for more general wiping-up on occasion in the bathroom, and now it’s degenerated to such a point that Mr. Larms thinks that wiping a filthy sink down with one counts as “cleaning” it, and I’m also guilty of doing this on occasion.

They’re expensive, chemical-laden AND wasteful paper-wise, so I’m ‘fessing up and committing to stop buying them completely so they just will not be around for us to waste/overuse. Also, they are a good example of the sort of modern cleaning product that you don’t have to bother trying to save money on via sales and coupons if you…just don’t use them!

So, those are two more feeble little steps in the works around our house! I plan to do some toilet-cleaning experiments in the near future. If you’re lucky, I won’t include before and after pictures for documentation.

Simple Green Toilets

As I was thinking about what household cleaning products we use most, toilet bowl cleaner is definitely up there. And as we have a septic system, everything that goes down the drain basically goes into our backyard, and back into our and our neighbors’ water eventually (which, when you think about it, is ultimately the same thing whether you have a septic system or not, it’s just on a much smaller scale). That thought will do wonders for bringing on substantial guilt about your household cleaners!

As part of our chemical-free adventures, I set out to figure out a simple green way to clean our grungy toilets. There are all sorts of recipes out there, ranging from the very basic (mostly involving baking soda + vinegar or borax) to the fairly frou-frou that involved too many ingredients to meet my “simple” requirement. And the weird: pouring in a can of Coke? powdered Tang? Um, I decided to skip those.

I initially was confused about whether borax is a legit non-toxic product or not.  Apparently it’s one of those things that’s natural, but still has the potential to be toxic to humans and other various critters. So you do have to be careful about keeping it out of children’s reach and with use around pets. But I figure it can’t possibly be worse than whatever makes my old cleaner 1) antibacterial and 2) blue.

Let’s get to the good stuff! Here’s what I found.

Baking soda and vinegar. The suggested ratio I saw on the interwebz was 1 part baking soda to 4 parts vinegar. I didn’t use that exact ratio because that just seemed like an absurd and unnecessary quantity of vinegar unless one was only going to use a tiny amount of baking soda. I mean, it was either gonna clean it or it wasn’t, you know? So, I sprinkled in about 1/4 cup of baking soda (from a giant 12-lb. bag I bought. Who knew baking soda came in 12-lb. bags??) and thought I’d be dainty and spray in the vinegar with a little spray bottle. That was pretty ineffective so I just dumped in some vinegar and got to scrubbing.

While the bubbleses were quite pleasing, this was not as effective as I’d hoped, cleaning-wise. BUT I must give the disclaimer that this toilet was especially grungy. I think on a more standard-dirty toilet, pretty much any mixture of baking soda and vinegar would prove decently effective.

Borax and lemon juice. The back of the borax box tells me I can also just dump 1/4 cup in the bowl, swish it around and let it sit for 30 minutes/overnight. So I tried that as well as pouring some in with some lemon juice and brushing/flushing right away. Both worked well. On a day-to-day basis, I’m not sure how practical it is to “need” lemon juice to clean your toilet. But I had a couple in the fridge so tossed it in.

The verdict, in my humble opinion? Well, since I now have a big box of Borax, and our toilets tend toward the grody, Borax it is for our household, I think. Apparently it’s quite the multipurpose cleaner, so I may give it a try for other things when baking soda won’t quite cut it.