Cleaning with vinegar

So, you may remember that I was really hoping to get through my 31 Days to Clean book this month, but it’s just not going to happen. Mr. Simple is now going to school and working ALL.THE.TIME making it very difficult for me to do much beyond the basic housekeeping and kid rearing. Hence the reason I didn’t get my menu plan put up yesterday. Maybe in a few months things will settle down. Still, if you don’t have Sarah Mae’s ebook 31 Days to Clean – Having a Martha House the Mary Way, you should look into it. It’s such a great inspiriation!

As promised, here is the second recipe in my series of homemade cleaner recipes for this month. Last week we talked about making homemade soft scrub. Well, this one isn’t exactly a recipe as much as it’s an ode to a great product. You have probably heard that vinegar is an awesome cleaner, and this is true. Vinegar will shine up your sink faucets and clean your mirrors. It will clean almost anything, actually.

White distilled vinegar is highly acidic, so it does an excellent job of killing most molds and bacterias. Obviously, it is an environmentally friendly way to clean your home, plus it’s pretty cheap. I can get a 64 oz. jug of white distilled vinegar at my local Walmart for $1.62. Sure beats a small $5 bottle of cleaner full of harsh chemicals.

I used to mix up a bottle of all-purpose cleaner made from half white distilled vinegar and half water. I would use this mixture to clean my countertops, mirrors, toilets, just about anything that needed a good spray and wipe. This is a great solution for most people, but I found that cleaning with vinegar this much caused a big problem in my house. The smell of vinegar attracted little fruit flies.

So, I asked around and other people who cleaned with vinegar never had this problem. It was obviously the vinegar because they only came out when I used it. Plus, I could make an awesome fruit fly trap with a bowl full of vinegar and a splash of dishwashing soap. I would just leave it out overnight and find all the dead fruit flies in the bowl the next morning. Apparently, the fact that I live in a flood zone and a wet area makes me more susceptible to those nasty fruit flies. I found that out from someone else on the internet with the same problem.

I’ve been told to try adding some tea tree oil to the vinegar solution to see if it changes attractiveness of the vinegar, so that’s next on my list of things to try.

Even if you don’t use vinegar as an all-purpose cleaner, you can still use it for other jobs.

• Use a vinegar solution to clean the inside of your fridge and microwave.
• Pour baking soda down your sink drain and then pour vinegar down it and allow the mixture to fizz and clean your drain.
• Shine your linouleum and no wax floors with one cup of vinegar per gallon of water.
• Scrub your grill with wadded aluminum foil spritzed with vinegar.

There are numerous other ways you can use vinegar to clean your home. How do you use vinegar around the house?