Friday, January 2, 2009

Homemade Natural Cleaning Products

I made my 1st cleaning product yesterday! After I vigorously cleaned the bathroom, with the window open to release the cleaning fumes (despite the outside temperature being 14 degrees), I came downstairs to find my husband ripping open the dishwasher. We have not sufficiently cleaned it since we moved in; after all, you put detergent in and it cleans itself, right? WRONG. It was clear the previous owners hadn't cleaned it either, and the thing is really old.

I'd been wanting to try & make my own cleaners for a while and had recently purchased the ingredients to do so. The problem was I didn't have any empty spray bottles. This was remedied during CVS's awesome 2-day sale a few weeks ago, where I scored 5 bottles of Arm & Hammer's new Essentials cleaners. Since you mix water and the little bottle of cleaning solution yourself, the bottle comes empty. PERFECT! Here's what I put in it:

Anti-bacterial Cleaner
3 cups water
1/2 - 1 teaspoon regular dish soap or Castille soap
1/3 cup white vinegar
12-15 drops lavender essential oil
12-15 drops tea tree essential oil

Put all in spray bottle and shake it up.

This was a perfect solution for cleaning the dishwasher parts, since I was concerned about the cleaning product residue then getting all over our dishes.

Need a cheap place to get essential oils? The 2 cheapest places I've found are Vitacost (where I get almost all my vitamins) & Puritan's Pride. I ended up purchasing my EO's from Vitacost because they had more of what I wanted & it was a teeny bit cheaper.

3 comments:

  1. Brenna! This is precisely what Gabbie is doing for a science fair project! For the past 3wks or so, she has been making homemade naturaly cleaning products and this week is comparing organic/commerical foods.

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  2. Brenna, where did you find Castille soap? We're having a hard time finding it.

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  3. A low cost, green eco friendly, healthy natural way to deal with general cleaning is to make a homemade liquid from soapberries which grow on the Chinaberry tree and have been used for thousands of years. They work very effectively.

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