Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Good old soap and water...


Go into any variety store or grocery store and you will find a bewildering array of products for cleaning your home.  Look around online and you will find many companies eager and willing to sell not only the typical cleaning products, but "natural and safe" products as well, all at an inflated price.

Being a confirmed penny pincer, I am generally skeptical of most of these items.  Not only are they expensive, but in general, most of them are not needed at all.  Let me tell you what I use to clean and disinfect with.

For general cleaning, I use plain bar soap, a wash rag and water.  If something needs to be disinfected, just get an opaque spray bottle and fill it with Hydrogen Peroxide which is very inexpensive.

If something is exceedingly greasy, I might add a little ammonia to the washing water and wear vinyl gloves when using that.

To clean windows and mirrors, here is the recipe I use.  If the windows are actually dirty, I first wash them off with the soap and water and wash rag.  Then, I spray on a small amount of this solution and dry it with a sheet of crumbled newspaper:

Window cleaning solution - to fill a 32 ounce bottle -
Mix together 1/4 cup rubbing alcohol, 1/3 cup vinegar, and add enough water to fill the spray bottle.  Shake it up a bit.  If your water is VERY hard, you might want to try distilled water, but I have never found that to be necessary.

To clean the bathtub, I rub a bar of soap onto a wet nylon scrubbing pad like these:Image result for picture of scotch brite pads
then I just scrub away and rinse!  There is No Need to use chemical things that can poison you and the environment. If you clean often enough, the job is very easy.  I do ours at least once a week.  If you have a larger family (there are only 2 of us) you might need to clean your bathtub a bit more often.
If I need a "scouring" powder, I just use plain baking soda.
So... my cleaning "products" are....water, plain bar soap, baking soda, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, and rubbing alcohol.
If I could only have ONE of these, it would be the soap, water and a wash cloth.  
How did we ever get convinced that we need to buy (and fill our closets with) all that stuff?



2 comments:

  1. The ad industry is totally designed to exploit us. But it's up to all of us to be discerning and not buy into these often unnecessary items.

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